Vandalism

Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Useful Computer Tricks Wiki. Examples of typical vandalism are adding irrelevant obscenities and crude humor to a page, illegitimately blanking pages, and inserting obvious nonsense into a page.

Vandalism is prohibited. While editors are encouraged to warn and educate vandals, warnings are by no means necessary for an administrator to block.

Even if misguided, willfully against consensus, or disruptive, any good-faith effort to improve the wiki is not vandalism. Edit warring over content is not vandalism. Careful consideration may be required to differentiate between edits that are beneficial, detrimental but well-intentioned, and vandalizing. Mislabeling good-faith edits as vandalism can be considered harmful.

Upon their discovery, revert clearly vandalizing edits. Then warn the vandalizing editor. Notify administrators of vandalizing users who persist despite warnings, and administrators should intervene to protect content and prevent further disruption by blocking such users from editing. When warranted, accounts whose main or only use is obvious vandalism or other forbidden activity may be blocked even without warning.

How to spot vandalism
Very useful ways to detect vandalism include:
 * Recent changes patrolling using the, recent changes link to spot suspicious edits
 * Keeping an eye on your watchlist
 * The edit history of an article may be checked for any recent suspicious edits, and compared with the version after any previous revert or cluster of non-suspicious edits. This method can check many suspicious edits at the same time. The article size, as given in bytes, usually increases slightly with time, while a sudden large decrease may indicate a section blanking.

In all the three methods above, examples of suspicious edits are those performed by IP addresses, red linked, or obviously improvised usernames. A good way to start is to click on every edit in watchlists, histories etc. with the least suspicion of being vandalism. Increased experience will probably give a sense of which edit descriptions are worth to check further and which may likely be ignored. IP editors should not be approached with the assumption that they are vandals. Although many vandals do vandalise without registering an account, there are many IP editors who are great contributors to Useful Computer Tricks Wiki. Always read the actual changes made and judge on that, rather than who made the changes.
 * See the what links here pages for Insert text, Link title, Headline text, Bold text and Example Image to detect test edits.
 * Watching for edits tagged by the abuse filter. However, many tagged edits are legitimate, so they should not be blindly reverted. That is, do not revert without at least reading the edit.