Help:Vandalism

Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to reduce the quality of the encyclopedia. The most common type of vandalism is the replacement of existing text with obscenities, page blanking, or the insertion of bad jokes or other nonsense.

Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism. Apparent bad-faith edits that do not make their bad-faith nature inarguably explicit are not considered vandalism at Fire Emblem Wikia. For example, adding an opinion once is not vandalism -- it's just not helpful, and should be removed or restated.

Committing vandalism is a violation of the Fire Emblem Wikia policy; it needs to be spotted, and then dealt with – if you cannot deal with it yourself, you can seek help from others.

Despite the fact that most vandalism is reverted rather quickly by more conscientuous members, vandals persist as a problem for all users, and it is a good idea when editing an article to check its recent history to see if recent vandalism has gone unnoticed – even if the last update was more than five minutes prior.

Not all vandalism is blatant, nor are all massive or controversial changes vandalism: Careful attention needs to be given to whether the new data or information is right or whether it is vandalism.

Dealing with vandalism
If you see vandalism (as defined below), revert it. It is often worthwhile to check the page history after reverting to make sure you have removed all the vandalism. Also, check the user contributions of the vandal - you will often find more malicious edits.

Types of vandalism
These are the most common forms of vandalism on Fire Emblem Wikia:
 * Blanking: Removing all or significant parts of articles (sometimes replacing the removed content with profanities) is a common vandal edit.
 * Spam: Adding inappropriate external links for advertisement and/or self-promotion.
 * VandalBot: A script or "robot" that attempts to vandalize or spam massive numbers of articles (hundreds or thousands), blanking, or adding commercial links. Another type of VandalBot appears to log on repeatedly with multiple random names to vandalize an article.
 * Childish vandalism: Adding graffiti or blanking pages.
 * Silly vandalism: Users will sometimes create joke articles or replace existing articles with plausible-sounding nonsense, or add silly jokes to existing article.
 * Sneaky vandalism: Vandalism which is harder to spot. Adding misinformation, changing dates or making other sensible-appearing substitutions and typos.
 * Attention-seeking vandalism: Adding insults, using offensive usernames, replacing articles with jokes etc.
 * User page vandalism: Replacing User pages with insults, profanity, etc.
 * Image vandalism: Uploading provocative images, inserting political messages, making malicious animated GIFs, etc. Repeatedly uploading images with no source and/or license information after notification that such information is required may also constitute vandalism.
 * Abuse of tags: Bad-faith placing of afd or speedy-deletion tags on articles that do not meet such criteria, or deceptively placing protected-page tags on articles.
 * Template vandalism: Adding any of the above to templates.
 * Page move vandalism: Moving pages to offensive or nonsense names.
 * Redirect vandalism: Redirecting articles or talk pages to offensive articles or images.
 * Link vandalism: Rewriting links within an article so that they appear the same, but point to something irrelevant or ridiculous.
 * Avoidant vandalism: Removing, and other related tags in order to conceal or avoid entries to risk deletion.
 * Removing warnings: Removing warnings, whether for vandalism or other forms of prohibited/discouraged behavior, from one's talk page is also considered vandalism.
 * Random character vandalism: Replacing topical information with random characters, or just adding random characters to a page. "aslkdjnsdagkljhasdlkh," for example.
 * Changing people's comments: Editing signed comments by another user to substantially change their meaning (e.g. turning someone's vote around), except when removing a personal attack (which is somewhat controversial in and of itself). Signifying that a comment is unsigned is an exception. e.g. (unsigned comment from user)
 * Improper use of dispute tags: Dispute tags are important way for people to show that there are problems with the article. Do not remove them unless you are sure that the dispute is settled. As a general rule, do not remove other people's dispute tags twice during a 24 hour period. Do not place dispute tags improperly, as in when there is no dispute, and the reason for placing the dispute tag is because a suggested edit has failed to meet consensus. Instead, follow the majority and accept that some edits will not meet consensus.
 * Talk page vandalism: Deleting the comments of other users from article Talk pages, or deleting entire sections thereof, is generally considered vandalism. Removing personal attacks is often considered legitimate, and it is considered acceptable to archive an overly long Talk page to a separate file and then remove the text from the main Talk page. The above does not apply to the user's own Talk page, where users generally are permitted to remove outside comments at their discretion, except in cases of warnings, which they are prohibited from removing.
 * Official policy vandalism: Deleting or altering part of a Fire Emblem Wikia official policy with which the vandal disagrees, without any attempt to seek consensus or recognize an existing consensus. Improving or clarifying policy wording in line with the clear existing consensus is not vandalism.
 * Copyrighted material vandalism: Knowingly using copyrighted material on Fire Emblem Wikia in ways which violate Fire Emblem Wikia's copyright policies is vandalism. Because users may be unaware that the information is copyrighted, or of Fire Emblem Wikia policies on how such material may and may not be used, such action only becomes vandalism if it continues after the copyrighted nature of the material and relevant policy restricting its use have been communicated to the user.
 * Account creation vandalism: Creating accounts with deliberately offensive terms in the username is considered vandalism, whether the account is used or not.