Vandalism

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    Vandalism is a problem on all large public wikis. It consists of making a page drastically less useful and reliable for the average end user, typically by inserting profanity or personal comments or provably false statements, "defacing" it, blanking it, reverting it to contain already-corrected errors, or other things that an editor would recognize as "damage". The word should be used only for cases of clear or simple vandalism.

    Sometimes removing critical links and references, big blocks of text, or reverts to material which is not false but perhaps controversial is called vandalism, but this is highly political and subject to much systemic bias and other community point of view issues; There are several cases which each need their own terminology:

    It is a common political tactic to call trolls "vandals" although there is a clear distinction between the two: one tells a vandal based on what ordinary end users would distinguish about the material; a troll on the other hand is a person whose view is merely offensive to someone in a sysop power structure; Neither has anything to do with the material's accuracy or bias necessarily. Trolling and vandalism are ontological distinctions, not operational ones - one cannot tell they have occurred based on responses or excuses or vigilantiism that they appear to "cause". It's a social question.