User blog:Bluebunny507/Why Vandalism is a Huge Problem

Hello wikians, this is RedBomb1 here with another blog on a wiki issue. In my first blog I discussed the negative nature of harassment and why one should never resort to it, and in this blog I will be discussing a similar issue that has been ongoing ever since knowledge databases like FANDOM and Wikipedia launched. Specifically, vandalism.

What is vandalism?
Vandalism is, to put it simply, blatantly bad-faith edits to pages. It may include the addition of juvenile, deceiving, repulsive, offensive, derogatory, off-topic, or overall inappropriate content, often replacing the accurate information and overriding users' productive contributions.

Why do people vandalize?
Good question. I too have always wondered why people would find it interesting to perform such juvenile acts. There could be many reasons: either the vandal has a strong distaste for the topic of the wiki/article, finds it funny, or is simply a troll with nothing better to do.

Why is vandalism a problem here?
A better question is "why wouldn't it be?". A knowledge base should always stay constructive in information provision and never exhibit such silly and immature acts. Vandalism is extremely disruptive towards a community because it hinders the reader's ability to absorb information on the topic they want to read about and often wastes the time of the people who have to revert it (luckily their is a team here to help with that, but I won't discuss it until later in the blog). Databases are very helpful uses for holding information on a vast variety of subjects and vandalizers desecrate their purpose and don't help the reader's desire to learn. While not all the information held on some wikis may be 100% accurate, vandalism certainly isn't either and won't help against the accuracy's case. In addition, while one may not like a wiki/article's topic, that under no circumstance gives them an excuse to deface a page's content.

Should one ever vandalize?
Absolutely not. All the problems addressed above definitely should be a giveaway as to why vandalism is never good and I don't think much more input is needed for this question. There are no exceptions to the vandalism policy.

How to deal with a vandal
If you are an admin on a certain wiki, the best solution would be to block the vandal and their IP address to prevent any further disruption, as well as any other sockpuppets they create and IPs they attempt to edit from. I also recommend rollbacking all of their edits to prevent them from disrupting the recent activity feed. Additionally, do not give them any attention whatsoever or express signs of anger towards them; that is a form of feeding the trolls. While vandalism is definitely disruptive, reacting to it while only encourage the vandal to continue the game. See Help:Don't feed the trolls for more informatuon.

If you are not an admin however, contact one to have the vandal dealt with.

However if the vandalism is really disruptive and excessive enough to the point where rolling it all back would be a waste of time, there is luckily a wiki for that to report the issue and have the team revert all their revisions in just one click as well as globally block them and their IP address.

Well that should be all and I would like to thank everyone who took their time to read this blog on such an issuous subject. I would also like to give a shoutout to TheOneFootTallBrickWall as I took some inspiration from a blog of his where he addressed this subject, and I found it so good that I couldn't help but make one of my own. This is RedBomb1, out. :)