Help:Prevent Vandalism

Vandalism

Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to destroy the integrity of the content. As wiki websites generally permit any one to create account and add or edit content, there is also chances for vandalism. But you need not worry about it, because mediwiki has powerful tools to save your valuable content from vandalism.

my watchlist

Logged in users have the convenience to watch pages by clicking on the watch tab on top of the page (just below your user name). Clicking on this link will add the page you are currently on to your watchlist. You can track the pages on your watchlist by clicking the my watchlist tab on top of the page. The watch link will change to unwatch for any page you have added to your watchlist. You can remove the page from your list by clicking this link.

Getting email notifications on changes

There is a facility for you to receive email notifications from the system when someone changes the pages on your watch list. To activate this facility:

• go to your Preferences page by clicking the my preferences link that you can see on top of all Colwiki pages.
• On your Preferences page you will be firs displayed User profile sub-page.
• On this page ensure that your valid email ID is displayed in the box for E-mail that you will see just below the box for Real name. If you had given your E-mail ID while creating the account on Colwiki, it will be displayed here. Otherwise now you can type it in the box for E-mail.
• now go to the last section named E-mail towards the end of the page.
• under E-mail section tick mark the (by one mouse click) box for E-mail me when a page I'm watching is changed. If you want to monitor even the minute changes, you can also tick mark the box for E-mail me also for minor edits of pages.
• now you can save the changes made to User profile by clicking the Save button at the bottom of the page.

See the picture below:

Revert a page to an earlier version

All the features as explained above help you to monitor changes and potential vandalism. Now, in the event of vandalism what is the oprion before you to retrieve your content? Here mediawiki provides you with a wonderful facility for reverting a page to an earlier edition. This feature is associated with the History feature that you have learnt in the topic on collaboration.

Steps for recerting a page

1. On the page you wish to revert, click on the History tab. Then click on the time and date of the earlier version you intend to revert to. It will not work if you click on 'cur', 'last', or "Compare selected versions".
2. When the page displays, you will see text similar to this: (Revision as of 15:35, 09 August 2009;) at the top of the page below the page's title.
3. You can navigate backwards or forwards through the chronology of changes by using the '←Older revision | Current revision | Newer revision→' links.
4. Verify that you've selected the desired former version of the page, then click the link to edit the page as you would normally.
5. You'll get a prominent warning, displayed above the edit box, about editing an out-of-date revision.
6. Ignore this warning and save the page. Be sure to add the word "revert" (or "rv") to the edit summary.

See the picture below