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Subtle vandalism epidemic -- where to report?
Hey -- I'm seeing a spate of vandalism from multiple IPs that make relatively subtle changes that for some reason aren't getting recognized by bots. Here's an example of an IP that's been doing this. I'm about to revert and warn in this case, but this feels like a bigger issue than a single user here or there. It looks bot-driven to me. Seems worth reporting somewhere, but I'm not sure where the right place is. Any suggestions? -- Avocado (talk) 20:48, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I don't necessarily know that this is bot-driven. It seems pretty similar to other vandalism to me, and a bot would probably be faster with higher volume. "Compiler" is probably a popular target because it's a fairly high-profile article on a subject most people who vandalize Misplaced Pages will know. Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:12, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
Guess I tripped over 3 or 4 similar changes by different IPs in a short period yesterday. What they had in common was removing or changing the last word of the first template on the page, and in the process removing one of the closing brackets, thus messing up the syntax and causing it to turn up in a search I was using to find pages needing short descriptions.
Each diff included roughly one or two words per paragraph across the entire article. These changes also inevitably included changing dates, and just generally making a hash of things, but not so obviously that someone skimming the article casually without knowing the subject would notice the problems. This is different from most of the vandalism patterns I've encountered in the past, which has tended to be either in big chunks or just a couple words total -- thus easily revertible, even with subsequent changes on top.
The difficulty of reverting these once someone else had edited the article was what really got to me. Part of why I posted here is that I don't like leaving vandalism like that up, but I'm currently only able to edit in occasional ~1min bursts while waiting for my computer to do other things, and reverting a diff like that once there are conflicts is something that would take far longer than that. So I'm not sure what to do in those cases. -- Avocado (talk) 22:28, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
Question
What causes occasional "spikes" of mass vandalism that last over a period of 10-30 minutes? is it always due to spam bots, or is it from several different unique users? DM5Pedia04:57, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
@DM5Pedia: Getting an answer to that would require first getting example cases, then doing analysis. I am not sure what exists. Check Scholia linked here for a survey of the available research. Bluerasberry (talk)14:09, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
New user on the scene as of today, deleting blocks of text in various topic articles. I'm handling the one article on my watchlist which he butchered, but I have no time to deal with the others. Wondering how to notify anyone... so here I am trying to notify here. Doesn't seem like a new editor. Grorp (talk) 05:02, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
