Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism Unit

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Shortcut: WP:CVU

The Counter-Vandalism Unit (CVU) aims to help in cleaning up vandalism on Wikipedia by producing tools to assist in removing vandalism, provide advice on dealing with vandals, and to share information with other Wikipedians dealing with the same issues. Removing vandalism is a task open to all members of the Wikipedia community, and the CVU intends to make that task easier.

Identifying with the CVU's role by one of the methods above does not grant you any special rights or privileges on Wikipedia. The CVU is not, and has not requested to be, sanctioned as an official project of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is merely a collection of individuals dedicated to removing vandalism and does not seek to represent itself as anything more. "Unit" is simply a little snappier than "WikiProject".

1 Current activity
2 Guidelines and policy
3 Tools
4 Recognition
5 User boxes
6 See also

[edit] Current activity

Vandalism
Dealing with vandalism
Obvious vandalism Requests for investigation Long term abuse Open proxies
Resources & assistance
Counter-vandalism tools Cleaning up vandalism Counter-vandalism unit IP WHOIS tools
Further information
AOL and dynamic proxies ISP contact information Don't provoke vandals v • d • e

See also: Wikipedia:Long term abuse

A change was made to the descriptions of one of the barnstars to specifically mention the CVU. 08:33, 18 September 2006 (EDT)

[edit] Guidelines and policy

Main article: Wikipedia:Vandalism

If an edit meets the criteria of vandalism, revert it. Please be graceful in your doing so and do not bite the newcomers. Non-severe vandalism should be dealt with using warning templates, whereas severe vandalisms should be reported directly to the administrators using the links below.

Report editing abuse:	Obvious, Complex, Open proxy or Long-term \| Sock puppets \| ISP reporting
Noticeboards:	Admins \| Incidents \| 3RR \| ArbCom enforcement \| Personal attacks \| Biographies

[edit] Tools

The following is a list of tools and resources available for those who want to approach cleaning up with a more systematic approach.

Screenshot of Wikipedia recent changes IRC feed

[edit] Monitoring

The old school way is to load recent changes and check the (diff) links. If they contain harmful edits, you revert to the previous version. However, the high volume of edits that occur each second makes this nearly impossible most of the time, and several tools have been created to simplify the process:

Vandal Fighter is a Java program that displays the IRC feed and allows filters to focus on certain types of changes (e.g. anonymous IPs). It also maintains a personal list of trusted users, watched articles, etc.
Lupin's Anti-Vandal Tool monitors the RSS feed and flags edits with common vandalism terms. It also has a live spellcheck feature.
VandalProof is a Windows program that provides several tools to make finding and reverting vandalism easier.
VandalSniper, a VandalProof-like application, is currently in beta. At the moment it has only been confirmed to run on Linux.
WikiGuard is an OSX program that monitors the IRC feed and attempts to approximate each edit's risk.
RC birds is a Java program that emits different bird sounds for the RC feed depending on the user.
The IRC Bot, pgkbot, by Pgk, runs on the IRC channels below.
IRC Bots reporting at the #vandalism-en-wp channel on the freenode network list suspected vandalism edits (for example: blankings, edits made by blacklisted users, etc.)
Young Orphans is a tool made by Interiot to find newly uploaded orphaned images. This is useful for finding various copyright violations and people who are using Wikipedia merely as an image hosting service.

[edit] Rollback scripts

Admins get a rollback button when looking at diffs in order to revert articles to their previous versions. However, non-admins can emulate such a button using several tools.

RC patrol script gives non-admins revert, filter, and popup tools while using the (default) monobook skin.
Godmode-light is a Javascript program to give nonadmins a rollback button.
Navigation popups are a set of utils that appear when hovering over wikilinks. Particularly, hovering over links of old versions provides a "revert" link.

[edit] Special pages

See the list of Wikipedia's most vandalized pages. The related changes link will display recent changes to all pages listed on Wikipedia:Most vandalized pages, for those who wish to follow vandalism on Wikipedia but who are unable or do not desire to use IRC bot tools.
User:Adam1213/warn is a page that simplifies the process of warning vandals by allowing warnings to be submitted to specific users directly from the page.

[edit] IRC channels

Note that these are not owned by, operated by, or affiliated with Wikipedia.

#vandalism-en-wp Primary RC bot listing/CVU meeting place (NickServ registration required; voice invitations available on request at #cvu-request)
#wikipedia-en-vandalism2 User vandalism and alternative RC bot listings (NickServ registration required)
#cvu Discussion/experimental bots channel (if you would like to report vandalism on IRC without registering, please do so here)
#cvu-proxies Open proxy reporting channel
#cvu-test Channel for bot testing
#cvu-checkuser Requests for checkuser (only works when an admin with checkuser is online)

[edit] Other

WikiDefcon

WikiDefcon 4: Low to normal levels of vandalism from shared IPs and experimenting users.

[[edit]]

Things seem to be cooling down now...maybe苏革曾 - (uiShtieK) — ^Talk/Contribs 07:03, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiDefcon is a tool used as an indication of the current overall level of vandalism that is taking place on Wikipedia. On the page, click the edit button below the Defcon meter to change its level from 5 to 1; 5 indicates very low levels of vandalism, and 1 indicates extremely high.
Counter-Vandalism Wiki (Not owned by, operated by, or affiliated with Wikipedia.)
Wikilink scripts enable you to double click on [[wikilinks]] within IRC clients. Useful if doing patrol on the IRC channels.
There are other scripts that may be handy while doing cleanup (not necessarily vandalism cleanup). Check them at WikiProject User scripts/Scripts (WP:JS)

[edit] Recognition

The RickK Anti-Vandalism Barnstar

The RickK Anti-Vandalism Barnstar (formerly the Anti-Vandalism Barnstar) may be awarded to those who show great contributions to protecting and reverting attacks of vandalism on Wikipedia. It was introduced on February 27, 2005 by brian0918, and was designed by Deathphoenix. It was renamed on July 24, 2005 in appreciation of the efforts of former Wikipedian RickK in fighting vandalism.