Have you noticed the rise in vandalism on Wikipedia these days? It’s hard not to notice if you’re a member and an active contributor to the site.

Almost after every edit, as if it’s a given thing, some guy from a random IP address, probably that of a proxy server or a public institution, thinks it would be hillarious to change “Greek Mythology” to “Geek Mythology“, or “east” to “yeast“.

It is a known fact that there are what are referred to as Vandalbots roaming the world wide web, which are nothing more than simple scripts that find and edit articles with nonsensical rubbish at uncontrollable rates. Well, at least uncontrollable on deserted articles, on which nobody has worked in for a while.

Occasionally, though, such articles pop in web searches. Luckily, even an article that has not been touched for over four months (it’s quite long considering the average frequency of edits on articles) is reverted back to its original form in a single click, as I frequently try to do when I spot such an article, but it’s still not enough.

Especially when it comes to the aforementioned bots, simultaneous edits on multiple articles make it even a harder problem to tackle.

It is, of course, possible for an administrator to revert all the changes by the vandals and spammers in a single click, but manual reversing of the damage and further edit on the pages can cause this function not to work properly.

But what about the main question at hand: why? Just… why even bother?

Fine, switching a sentence like “when they got married, she was 15 years old” to “when they got married, she raped a 15 year old boy” might be funny (if you ponder about it for some time), but just entering random stuff, repetition of letters, meaningless numbers and worst of all, removing the whole article and replacing it with stupid netspeak, not only is it not original, but it’s just a waste of time.

I have even witnessed a case where this guy claimed to be a hacker. Way to go, guy, for having vandalised an easily editable, open-to-public wiki page and calling you a hacker for it. Probably another 14 year old trying to pose.

I also consider excessive information on the popular culture section in most articles as vandalism. Sometimes the trivia information might be fun to read, but a reference in the article of Godot such as “there wuz a FF7 character called gogo” is just crossing the line. The sad thing is, this person’s records didn’t really show vandalism per se, but rather small and unimportant edits. This “kid” is not considered as a vandal, but rather just a horrible editor.

The solution? Cut public access. Make it a rule that one MUST be a registered member in order to make any changes on any article. At least with that way, banning a user account would be much simpler.

It is not possible to do a background check on everyone who registers, and it’s not expected from the community anyway. What is expected by many is, however, a simple limit to who may have editing access to the website, by making edits more traceable to individuals rather than IP addresses that might be used by hundreds in any given day.