QuinnM
1
I was wondering if we could make a world black-list where you could put any bad words and abbreviations for them and they won’t show up in edits. I feel like it would help the vandalizing problem. Thanks!
I’m not really sure this would change much? We try to keep blacklisting for the really persistent spammers and people who are constantly advertising or edit-warring on pages despite warnings and blocks. If we blacklist profanity, all that’s going to do is encourage people to find ways to evade the blacklists, which doesn’t really help.
system
3
A little bit of history might be in order here…
Waaay back in the early days of wikiHow, we used to be quite stringent with vandals. We’d warn. We’d block, we’d scold, and it ended up being a game. The vandals didn’t much care whether they got positive or negative attention, as long as we were paying attention to them. It got so bad that the more persistient vandals would openly mock the patrollers… Ha ha! Ya blocked me, but I got around it and NOW Look what Ican do! .
It made for some rather unpleasant patrolling circumstances, and we’d dread having to go patroll again.
So we (but mostly Jack Herrick, the founder of the site) came up with an alternative approach. Jack paid for a bunch of us to go through some communications classes online. Classes about how to deescalate a conversation and bring consensus. We then took those ideas and applied them to our situations here on the site.
Instead of bringing down the ban hammer on a troll, we’d welcome them warmly, compliment what we could honestly compliment, and suggest the best option for future editing. We’d graciously sidestep the confrontation over “bad” edits by assuming that they were just trying to edit correctly and just needed a little extra help to get it right going forward.
This approach is basically what you see today. We’ve stopped being the mean jerks… and have instead met vandalism with equanamity and helpful suggestions as to how to best edit on the site. The attention seekers dropped off precipitously… and those who were just messing up by accident or lack of information learned how to edit correctly and many of them have become long term editors (and even admins!)
The suggestion of a profanity black list though, is unhelpful for all the reasons GR lists. Further, it really does cause escalation when you say “you can NOT do this…”… because then it becomes a challenge, or a game to try to get around the rules.
So my vote? is to continue to welcome and coach the newbies, even if their initial edits are somewhat less than stellar.
Best.
Pretty much the only thing that gets blacklisted is spammy links and phrases
Wriara
5
I believe that blacklisting is a good idea. Swearing on wikiHow should be prohibited. It should be noted that children can browse wikiHow and stumble across vandalized pages with slang and profanity in them. That can ruin their experience. wikiHow should be age-appropriate. Even if the swear is partially or completely censored, it should still be blacklisted.
Wriara
6
Blacklisting can help filter out swear words.
We would spend an eternity trying to filter every method of attempting to bypass any filtered words; and we’d always be one step behind.
Wriara
8
For the best, we’ll currently just try to do our best to revert inappropriate edits that have slang and profanity and edit inappropriate user pages in order to do our job to make the internet a better place.
I’m a day late, but it’s also worth noting that unpatrolled edits (e.g. unpatrolled vandalism) don’t, and shouldn’t, show up to users who are logged out - and since it’s likely that most children using wikiHow are logged out, it wouldn’t affect them unless the vandalism was patrolled. At that point, it becomes an issue for everyone, not just the kids
Wriara
10
I know. Another issue is that sometimes, a vandal will approve bad edits and spam.
And that’s undoable. I think the general consensus is that blacklisting bad words isn’t going to happen, so it might be worth closing the thread
