Discussion:What is Vandalism?

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--Kydo (talk) 23:26, 22 December 2016 (MST)

So, in the last couple of months, there have been several pages identified as vandalism by administrators. The actions we took were met by considerable backlash by users who claim the pages are not vandalism. They are offended by the way I and others have reacted to their work, serious or not. This opens up a philosophical can of worms for me.

On a factual wiki, like wikipedia, it's easy to spot vandalism: anything blatantly identifiable as a lie is vandalism. Simple. However, this is not that kind of wiki. We deal in creative works, with the wiki as our primary medium. While we can usually identify vandalism easily, (a user changing every other word to "penis" in an otherwise normal page, for example) there is unfortunately some room for ambiguity and misunderstanding. I think that is exactly what has happened. Something was far enough outside of what we were used to, we misidentified it, and in turn have mistreated several new users. That's no good. So I think it's time we had a talk about what vandalism is, how we identify it, and what we should do about it.

First off, I'll say what I know about vandalism. Back in 2006, I was a vandal. I went out of my way to deface public buildings with spray paint. That was a crime. The only reason I didn't get arrested and fined was luck. I stopped after I coincidentally walked by a place I had damaged... The only person I hurt was whoever had to clean it up. I had made no change to society whatsoever, I had just given a person a bad day at work.

Vandals don't really defend their work, because when faced with reality, they find it indefensible. They also rarely return, because they know the end result will be its removal. You can't justify mild sociopathy. The fact that people came back and tried to make a case, whether or not it moved or convinced us, implies very strongly that the works were not vandalism.

Vandalism is intentionally harmful. As I used to say back in high school, "vandalism is weaponized art". The whole point is to hurt someone. Usually, the intent is to hurt a particular person in a particular way in order to make a point or make a change. It doesn't often work, because the message is almost always incomprehensible to the recipient, and it almost never gets to the right person anyways. In general, vandalism is the least effective mode of communication humanity has ever invented, second only to interpretive dance.

I think that, in order for us to better deal with this in the future, we need a better way of sussing out intent when a contribution is absurd but also does not break any specific policies.

Sure, in most cases, I think we can go with consensus without much trouble. A person who changes a race to death 10d6 damage instead of 1d6 with its natural weapons is going outside of the community standards. (Nobody's argued against the guidelines yet, so I guess they're good for now!) A person who changes a classe's first feature to be named "Wang-Wanker" is introducing inappropriate sexual content to the wiki. Both, while perhaps not vandalism, don't fit with the community here. However, if someone introduces a feat that revolves around shouting "UNO" whenever someone rolls a 6 or less on any die... as absurd as it is... they may very well actually enjoy that content, and not as a joke, and genuinely want to share it with others. It's not my cup of tea, but then, neither are dungeon crawls, hex crawls, or tactical miniatures combat. There are infinite ways to play the game, and telling people that their playstyle is either a joke or it must be badwrongfun just because they are a distinct minority in the community would be wrong.

Of course, I could be wrong, and this could all be the work of one excellent troll with a talent for sock-puppetry. (Though at this point I find that unlikely) What do you folks think?

Oportet (talk) 22:12, 4 January 2017 (MST)

I'm not an administrator, but this is still interesting to me. Just today, I noticed a page I created had been edited. I didn't agree with those edits, but at the same time I know that the page isn't "mine" anymore, it's the public's. Still, is there a limit to how much the public should edit a page?

My personal guidelines are based on Help:Spirit and Intent. If I ever need to discuss a page I authored, I try to clearly state my intent. In addition, I give reasons why it's my intent. I recognize that just because it's my intent doesn't make it right. For instance, if I built a two-story statue of a swastika in my front yard, odds are the world would be better off if it was vandalized. Sure, I might be upset at how you vandalized my property, and you probably aren't doing a good job at communicating why a two-story tall swastika makes a bad lawn ornament, but my property wasn't being put to good use anyways. The question is: what makes something worth keeping?

From a game design standpoint, I don't think we can regulate every single contribution for quality. Not just because of logistics, but because quality is subjective. A person looking to blow of steam from a hard day's work plays with a different mindset than someone that spends hours designing character sheets. There are probably ways of catering to both of these archetypes, and we should be having discussions on how to maximize our contributions' quality anyways. Perhaps that's what differentiates vandalism; lack of discussion.

My personal policy when editing pages is, if I see a design decision that strikes me as odd, I bring it up on the talk page. If there's a significant period of time with no response - say, one to two weeks - I assume that either A) the author isn't able or willing to respond, or B) there'll be a significant downtime where people are using their content anyways, and we need to consider those people too. I go ahead with the edit. If anyone that reverts the edit without discussing it first is not contributing to the discussion, and thus isn't helping create quality content. I'm not sure how I feel about restoring my edit, though. At that point, it feels rather edit war-ish. Still, I can't think of anything else I could do that would entice conversation.

My one-to-two week period isn't based on any measurement. In the interest of speed and effectiveness, it might be best to perform the edit immediately after inviting discussion on the talk page. Though, if everyone did that, a long discussion would make for lots of back-and-forth editing. Still, if the community doesn't know which version of the article is best anyways, then I can't see why editing back and forth would cause confusion. We're not Wikipedia; we're not looking for facts, and nothing is stopping a group from using a previous version of an article. Besides, we're a wiki. Edits are expected, though it wouldn't hurt if this was mentioned on a frequently traveled page. So long as we have discussion, we're making progress.

So if we know how to improve quality, what is the cutoff for too low quality? It'd be nice to have some "soft" quality guidelines, stuff that when taken together indicates lack of quality. Like "keep grammah mistakes to a minimum", "use consistent formatting", "avoid egregious breaks from precedent", "interpretive dance is not a valid language", that sort of thing. We already have some guidelines in the help portal, but they all tend explore topics very deeply. Which is good, but it's quite a lot to expect people to read. Maybe make a short list of 10 or so general rules, with links to the policies that explain their reasoning. If you are confused about a rule, you can read why, and even discuss it on the policy's talk page. Though that opens up a whole new can of worms, where we worry about keeping the official discussion avenues healthy without eating up all of the admins' time. Maybe, instead of friendly discussion, we do whatever we want and ban everyone that complains? What could possibly go wrong?

--Kydo (talk) 12:24, 5 January 2017 (MST)

See, this is why there should be a discussion about this topic. Everyone's just making up their own personal standards as they go along. We're like wiki-Cowboys. That doesn't sound much like consensus to me. Unfortunately, Marasmusine has made it very clear that he does not want to participate in such a discussion, and no one else has shown any interest either.

I wrote Spirit & Intent to communicate a lot of ideas, but it's currently very biased toward my own ideal standards- which I rarely live up to myself. My hope was that other users and admin would notice that it's a policy and tweak it until we reach a consensus regarding the topic. No such discussion happened. As such, I am inclined to delete it. Without input from the community at large, it could easily do more harm than good. Just look at what happened when I wrote a description for the April Fools tag! I'm just one guy, and I can't predict how everyone will interpret my words, especially I'd they're designing for a play style I am unaware of or failed to consider.

I think the Help:Improving, Reviewing, and Removing Templates kind of are the soft standards you're talking about. Just reading down the list, we expect:

• At least some degree of tech support, from at least one editor, after "completion".
• An attempt to retain the style of a wiki, mostly by supporting the preloads.
• An honest attempt at balance.
• An effort made at discussion and review.
• An attempt to produce a work which is "complete" in the sense that all basic information is available and the content is usable.
• Decent technical writing, producing an understandable and usable product.

Also, on addition to these standards, we have a variety of disclaimers for expanding the wiki's horizons utility. As long as you use the proper disclaimer...

• It's OK to post jokes.
• It's OK to post mature content.
• It's OK to design to a specific playstyle or standard outside of precedent.
• It's OK to post fan-works.
• It's OK to put a "completed" page through a major revision, be it long- or short-term.
• We appreciate pictures.

Beyond those most basic, bare-bones expectations, we also have the standards set forth by our Featured Articles project. These describe, not the minimum expectations, but the desired goal; the standard of quality we would wish to see on all pages if it were possible. To quote them verbatim...

1. It is eloquent, comprehensive and stable.
   1. "Eloquent" means that the prose is succinct, engaging, even brilliant, and of professional standard.
      1. Thus, pages that are in effect "options", (equipment, feats, skills, etc) of DMs and player characters cannot normally become featured articles, as they are typically lacking in total content. A rule of thumb for a bare minimum from any page is 3 paragraphs containing three complete sentences apiece, plus listed mechanical properties, (Weight, price, prerequisites, etc.) containing both mechanics/rules and descriptive/flavor text.
   2. "Comprehensive" means that the article does not neglect major facts and details, and it means that the article is not subject to any improving, reviewing, and removing article template's meta.
   3. "Stable" means that the article is not the subject of ongoing edit wars and that its content does not change significantly from day to day, except for edits made in response to the featured article process. A rule of thumb for this criteria is about 3 weeks to a month without any major changes or debate regarding page content.
2. It follows the articles related preload (with referenced source material), it follows Standards and Formatting, and grammar conventions including, but not limited to, When to Italicize and Capitalize.
3. It has images and other media where they are appropriate to the subject, with succinct captions and acceptable copyright status. The images should be relevant and high quality thumbnails sized 300px, 600px, or 750px for very short horizontal images.
4. Where it makes reference to pre-existing rules, they are referenced via a link to the relevant SRD or Homebrew page, or otherwise by a correct book/page/section citation, (IE: PHB pp. 222, under "Example Citations").
5. Variant rules should be beneficial, understandable and elegant.
   1. "Beneficial" means that the variant rule should be useful to the D&D game. (For example, a variant rule which adds a drinking game on top of play would have no direct impact on the game, has nothing to do with Dungeons and Dragons itself, and so would be a poor candidate.)
   2. "Understandable" means that the variant rule is written in such a way that it can be comprehended by the average player by utilizing conventions including, but not limited to, When to Italicize and Capitalize.
   3. "Elegant" means that the variant rule should not be more complicated than is absolutely necessary, preferably as efficient as possible, and should be in its most understandable state. It should enhance game play and not slow it down.

And we have our behavioral policy to guide the nature of contributions. Someone might try to post a racist joke page and try to protect it with an April Fools tag, but the page would still be invalid by the behavioral policy, and so would get removed. In addition to these, I also wrote Precedent to explain where our standards for balance come from, (and to give us a handy keyword to use when discussing the subject) as a way of justifying usage of the guidelines to apply improving templates by policy. The guidelines themselves go into detail about the actual balance standards members of this community stand up for in a given type of content. I also wrote Spirit and intent to set some standard for what the objective of editing a page should be. ("Make it good" > "make it mine") I even wrote Help:A Good DM, which is a guide to conducting discourse on game design balance without committing the Oberoni Fallacy, and how to identify it!

...And keep in mind that all of this is additional policy ON TOP OF the policies we borrow from Wikipedia! So, with all of the policy, guidelines, expectations, and editing tools at our disposal, I can see why people would see a discussion like this redundant.

However, a lot of these things were written by different people, at different times, and in some cases have very little external input. There is no discussion of how these things interact with each other, or how they are prioritized. (Obviously, the behavioral policy and its various components and sources trumps all, but other than that it seems to be a free-for-all) There is no discussion about how administrators should make use of any of this. We just sort of figure it out based on past experience prior to becoming admin... and some of that is clumsy trial and error.