Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Vandalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Problem

There's nonsense in an article, or an article is blank.

Nonsense (or "vandalism") can include:

• Obviously false or fabricated information
• Profanity (where it's not relevant)
• Sexual remarks (where not relevant)
• Racist and other shocking remarks (where not appropriate citations, of, say, a racist historical character)
• Inappropriate pictures (e.g. pictures of genitalia on an article not discussing genitalia)
• Random junk text
• Explicit information on an individual, grotesque or malicious allegations, etc.

These are typically added by Internet users who want to "test" the Wikipedia system, or just enjoy shocking people. We have not been "hacked". Vandalism on Wikipedia is a side effect of the open editing process and does not require "hacking" in the sense of complex schemes of unauthorized entry. Vandalism is not regular Wikipedia content and is against Wikipedia's rules.

Please do not give more importance to these people than they should have. Remember: vandals enjoy seeing how much they shock people, how much indignation they create. The more fuss they create, the happier they are. It is much better to fix the problem quietly and deprive the vandals of the notoriety they crave. (See our "Deny recognition" page.)

Solutions

All revisions are kept indefinitely in the article history, so vandalism is easy to fix.

Fix the article yourself

Wikipedia is a wiki, so you can edit the content yourself — you don't even need to create an account! We use the term "revert" to refer to restoring a previous version of an article.

Go to the article and click edit this page near the top.

If the offending content does not appear when you try to edit, then it has already been fixed. In that case, you don't need to do anything, even to let us know. Force your Web browser to reload the page by bypassing your cache.

Wait a little while

Our volunteers process emailed vandalism reports quickly. However, vandalism is normally spotted even faster by other volunteers patrolling the web site. In the case of articles about major topics, or of the "home page" or "main page", it is mostly useless to email us — problems on those pages are typically fixed long before we even receive your e-mail. Wait a few minutes and try loading the page again.

Purge the cache

This especially applies to high-profile articles (biographies of major personalities in the news, and so on).

On occasion, users will continue see old, vandalized, versions of articles even after those problems have already been fixed. This happens because our most-visited pages are "cached" on our servers for performance reasons.

The best solution for this problem is to purge the server cache. To purge the cache for a particular article, simply add ?action=purge to the end of the article's URL. (For instance, if the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin contains vandalism, then viewing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin?action=purge is likely to make it disappear.) Purging the cache will also help other people who are having the same problem as you.

You may also wish to try bypassing your browser's cache.

Email us

If you'd still like to e-mail us, then please include only the following information:

• Exact URL for the article with the problem. This is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... part that your Web browser shows above the article itself. Please copy and paste this exactly, without any change; otherwise we may not be able to assist.

• A brief but specific description of what you think is wrong, including any offensive remarks or profanity. This works best if you copy and paste the improper text; in some cases, though, screenshots can be useful.

We do have a few extra guidelines for faster e-mail processing:

• If the content appears on Google or other search engines, but not in the Wikipedia article, then we cannot do anything about it. Search engines keep their own copy of Wikipedia and it is not updated in real time. This means that if they happened to take their copy at a time when there was undesirable content on Wikipedia, then the undesirable content will continue showing in the search engine even if it has long been corrected at Wikipedia. We cannot do anything about it. The solution is to either wait until the search engine updates itself (a few days, probably) or to contact the company running the engine.

• If the offending content has disappeared when you try to edit the page, reload the page, use the printable version, use a different browser, or perform another action, then it has already been corrected. Please do not email us. Wikipedia pages are designed to change quickly. There are no "hidden tricks" or "hacking issues" involved.

• Please keep to the point: list the URL of the article and tell what is wrong. While general remarks on how to improve Wikipedia, the Internet, Internet-related law or other similar topics may be interesting, they just get in the way of telling us about the issue.

• We can only fix Wikipedia; we have no direct control over content on Answers.com, Google, Yahoo!, or other sites.

• We cannot deal with editing disputes through this email address. Please see Wikipedia:Resolving disputes instead.

• Our email system does not show colors, boldface, italics, underlines, or other forms of text formatting. Please stick to plain text.

• Please do not send Microsoft Word attachments; not all of our volunteers' systems will be able to handle them. Instead, if you must send a screen shot, please send it as an image file instead.

Send your concerns to info-en-v@wikimedia.org with the details of the problem.