Hi all I have been patrolling and I have been seeing lots of vandals. I want to stop it and I think that we should implement sone new tactics. More strong and easier tools to find a user and block them would be great and then, to stop people randomly blocking people, admins can see who blocks who. An idea, expand on it please
Administrators are the only ones that can currently block people and there is a current way of admins seeing who blocks who. Blocking is the very last thing an administrator wants to do in any given situation.
http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/740/orca-group/p1
This looks like what you’re trying to do. See the arguments against it.
You could always join ORCA. After I finish the group, it can keep track of the amount and type of vandalistic edits. Of course, unless a couple of admins turn up in ORCA, the blocking portion of what you wrote will be useless. (Anyhow, that is not really the current project goal.)
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Hey Peter! Interesting idea. Can you give an example or two of a vandal who you would have wanted to block, but who didn’t get blocked? Or didn’t get blocked fast enough?
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I see tons of vandalism, but the majority of vandals are one timers, many of which are drawn to featured articles because of the Google RSS feed. Usually the best way to deal with them is to ignore them unless they make multiple bad faith edits or vandalisms in a short time. There are very few times an admin is not online and available, with some living on almost every continent, and checking the logs allows an experienced user to find one if they are familiar with their names. Simply leaving a talkpage message should get quick results. The administrator notice board is also a good bet to get a situation resolved quickly if the problem is obvious enough to deal with immediately. There are two things to remember, however… very few vandalisms are real emergencies, and I am not aware of any harm that cannot easilly be undone by any patroller, so blocking users, as stated above, is a last resort in most cases.
This is a discussion that comes up periodically with newer users, so I’ll attempt to summarize previous discussions as an FYI. Vandals are annoying. We all agree on that. The problem we run up against is that vandals tend to do what they do for the attention it gets them. If we hammer them harder, we’re just encouraging them to do more of the same. It’s like wrestling with pigs… you both get dirty, and the PIG LOVES IT! Over the long term, it has proven more effective to go softcore with vandals. We send them nicely worded notes which assume that they have only accidentally messed up while editing… offering help to get them up to speed. This both removes their incentive, and gives us the possibility of turning them around into constructive editors. (yes, I’ve seen this happen multiple times) This also dials down the tension in our communications, and helps keep us all civil and cooperating with each other. See http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Assume-Good-Faith
for a summary of the core wiki value which pushed us in this direction.
I don’t think we should all be able to block whomever we like. What if a vandal decided to block everyone? Not so great a situation… I think blocking should always be a privilege reserved for a select group of trusted editors. Also, everyone deserves a few warnings before the block. Besides, a lot of vandals are newer or unregistered users who haven’t really learned the rules fully. Blocking should be a last resort, after trying to get him/her to cooperate and giving the vandal a few warnings. What may appear to be an act of vandalism may simply be a mistake on the editor’s part, not something s/he should be blocked for.
I agree will KatyBliss 100%. An editor may put something like “dfjdlgjfdg” on an article to test to see what would happen. I like using the {{Test}} template instead of the {{Warning}} template. I only use the warning template when they put inappropriate words into an article.
Thanks for the replies all
