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Many of us have heard about wikis being victims of vandalism. Offering easy and open access to editing a website obviously opens the door to vandalism. Wikis have seen HTML encoded or decoded, blank lines deleted, or even completely deleted content. Wikipedia is pretty good about correcting vandalism as quick as possible. For instance, I changed the spelling of Daniel to Daniell and it was instantly corrected. If you go read the history for “Daniel,” http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel&action=history, you will notice that this site gets a lot of attention and is being edited daily, some even fixing vandalism. Wikipedia is a very popular site and errors get fixed almost instantly. But on other sites that receive vandalism can go unnoticed for a period of time.

There are several protections that Wikipedia uses in order to cut down on vandalism. For example “September 11 2001 attacks” has full protection. Full protection disables editing for everyone except other administrators. Fully protected images cannot be overwritten by new uploads.

Semi-protection disables editing from anonymous accounts and those accounts fewer than four days old.

Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled. If you are prevented from editing this article, and you wish to make a change, please discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.

Examples of semi-protected sites are pay per click, your mom, and Paris Hilton. These sites tend to get a lot of vandalism so they need protection from vandalism. If you google “Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled. site:en.wikipedia.org,” it will pull up a page of all the site that have this semi-protection. All these sites attract vandalism so that is why they need to be protected.

There are also edit wars where two contributors have different opinions. They basically go back a forth changing the page over and over again. Sometimes an administrator has to step in and solve the war by intervening and coming up with a solution.

Most of these problems could be fixed on the discussion board. The discussion board allows users to discuss issues containing the content of the page. Rather than changing the page continually it is better to just discuss the focus and goal of the page. When the site has protection, as I discussed previously, you can use the discussion board to state your opinions.

I think that the on-line community is coming up with many great solutions to control vandalism. There will always be people trying to stir up problems though. But, they are going to have to try harder and harder to get in and vandalize.

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