Wiki vandalism

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This page concerns the general phenomenon of vandalism on wikis; for information on vandalism to Wikipedia, see [Vandalism].

Wiki vandalism is generally defined as editing a wiki in a way that is intentionally disruptive or destructive. There are four generally acknowledged types of vandalism: deletion of legitimate information, insertion of nonsense or irrelevant content, addition of unwanted commercial links (spam), and policy violations specific to that wiki.

Contents

1 Administrative response
2 Prevalence
3 Motives
4 See also

Administrative response

Administrative responses vary from wiki to wiki, but most vandals are blocked by username or IP address when it becomes clear they are not simply experimenting. To mitigate spam, some wikis automatically add the "rel=nofollow" attribute to all external links, which tells search engines to ignore those links and thereby largely negates any incentive to spam that wiki. Violations of policy are often severely dealt with by extended or indefinite blocks once it is clear that the user is not simply ignorant of the rules. Servers known as open proxies allow users to circumvent blocks by changing their apparent address, and are often indefinitely blocked upon detection until they are closed.

Systems of wiki etiquette often exist to help prevent mistaken accusations of vandalism. However, such systems sometimes incite vandalism by giving administrators too many justifications for action, which may breed resentment among the wiki's members.

Although the majority of public wikis shun mandatory registration, most popular wiki engines (including FlexWiki, MediaWiki, MoinMoin, UseModWiki, PmWiki, and TWiki) provide ways to limit edit permissions. Many engines allow individual users to be blocked as editors by blocking their particular IP addresses or usernames. However, some Internet service providers regularly assign a new IP address, some within a single session (AOL is infamous for this), so IP blocks can often be circumvented relatively easily and may prevent legitimate users from editing. Entire IP ranges can be blocked to stop vandals, but this may affect many legitimate users.

Prevalence

It is difficult to find or create general statistics on the prevalence of wiki vandalism. Controversial or high-traffic topics seem to attract the most vandalism. Small wikis rarely have unmanageable vandalism problems, since they are protected by their relative obscurity. Even very politically charged ones such as openpolitics.ca, dkosopedia, or sourcewatch usually receive only a few attempts at vandalism from those opposed to their ideology. In general, spam(bots) are the most common vandals on small wikis.

Motives

Attributing motives is often difficult, since vandals generally refrain from joining serious discussion. However, there are several popular explanations:

To inhibit boredom.
To see what one can do without punishment as in Breaching experiments.
To express scorn or dislike for a project.
To annoy or inconvenience other members.
To vent real-life or wiki frustration.
To increase traffic to a website for either recognition or financial gain.
To injure rival authors for the sake of injury.
To amuse others.

Wiki vandalism

Administrative response

Prevalence

Motives

See also