This page is intended as
humor. It is not, has never been, nor will ever be, a Wikipedia
policy or guideline. Rather, it illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by
the Wikipedia community.
This page in a nutshell: If you are ever tempted, and are not intimidated by the consequences, go ahead and vandalize all you want. Be warned, you will get caught, and it is a temporary privilege.
Do you want to intentionally
irritate others because it's fun? Or do you want to do it just for the thrill of it?
Do you want to get blocked?
Then go right ahead: vandalize any pagecitation needed that you please. Maybe an artist, a politician, or someone's
user page, but definitely not this article. You don't even need to
log in or
make an account – just click edit at the top of the page, do what you like in the text box that appears, and click save at the bottom when you're done. Easy as that!
You might get
caught by an automatic filter. If so, just change your text and click save again. And again. And again, until your edit is saved.
So you were able to vandalize, right? Here's what will happen next:
Your vandalism will be
reverted. It will usually happen within minutes, if not seconds. A lot of obvious vandalism is reverted automatically (and usually immediately) by an automated computer program
ClueBot NG.
You will be left with an
ugly message on your
user talk page. Even if you remove it, which you can do, it'll always remain in the
history of your talk page, and anyone will be able to see it (unless you request revision deletion or oversight, but in those cases users with those privileges will still see them anyway).
Your acts of vandalism will always be a part of your
user contributions, and will be archived in the
history of the page you vandalized. It will have your username (or if you are not logged in, your
IP address) in it. And it might have a
tag beside it that may say "repeated characters", "
shouting", or (literally) "possible
vandalism". Unless someone asks an
admin to
hide your edit, anyone will be able to see your vandalism, which will look really, really ugly if you are striving to be a respected editor. Even if someone does, admins can still see your vandalism edit. Even if oversighters overlook your vandalism edit, they can still see the edit.
If you continue vandalizing (and yes, you can!), you will be left with more ugly messages, and eventually
a big fat ugly message telling you that you are
unable to edit Wikipedia. If you try to click edit on any page now (except for your user talk page), you will find this is most definitely not a lie.
What can you do now? You may
appeal the block, of course. Simply
add a request to your talk page. Sooner or later an admin will see it, and say yes or no. If they say no, you can wait, or you can appeal your block again. If you make too many bad requests or misuse your talk page, though, your talk page access may be revoked.
If you vandalize without logging in, it'll make it harder for you or anyone else to make valid edits or register a username while connected via that
IP address or range. We have
tools that can tell whether you're at home, work, school, or pretty much anywhere else in the world. If you vandalize from a
shared IP or a
proxy server, you are more likely to get blocked for a longer time – maybe even a year or two. Regardless, if you get blocked, other innocent editors, perhaps respected ones, may also get blocked for a while.
Any pages that you vandalize may get
protected, making it harder for others to edit legitimately. That's why we have
autoconfirmed and even
extended confirmed users, but as a regular vandal, you will almost never be one of them. At least some innocent users won’t get to edit them for a while, so great job!
If you use
sockpuppets (multiple accounts), you will eventually get caught by a
checkuser. Your IP address and all of your accounts will be blocked.
If you bring your vandalism to other
Wikimediaprojects like
Wikibooks or
Wiktionary, a
steward will globally lock your account, preventing you from being able to edit pages on any Wikimedia project. In some cases, your IP may even be globally blocked.
If you do lose Internet access due to abuse, just get another internet service provider and you can start the cycle all over again! At least until there are no more providers to abuse the project with. In that case, you might as well resort to other illegal crimes against Wikimedia! Even if it means murder! Go on, do it!
'Cause rules stink, right?
If doing all this by yourself seems too hard, you could ask your friends to help them out, if they're in the mood for it. If not, consider getting your
little brother or sister, or mischievous cousin.
And if you ever decide you want to become a productive member of Wikipedia, contributing to the compendium of knowledge available for the education of all on this grand site, you may just find that it’s too late. You may only ever be remembered as a joker. Is that what you want your life’s legacy to be? Eh?
If you've done one, more or all of this stuff, congratulations. Enjoy your permanent ban from the project, and unless
you do have intentions of editing constructively, so long. If you had also vandalized other Wikimedia projects, congratulations, enjoy your
permanent ban from all of Wikimedia. In other words,
GG.