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Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia. The most common type of vandalism is the replacement of existing text with obscenities, page blanking, or the insertion of other wholly irrelevant content.
Any good faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if it's misguided or incorrect, is not vandalism. Apparent bad-faith edits that do not make their bad-faith nature inarguably explicit are not considered vandalism.
Vandalizing pages is a violation of Muppet Wiki policy. A user who continues to post vandalism after receiving three warnings (see below) may be blocked from editing the wiki for a short period of time, at the discretion of the Muppet Wiki administrators.
Revert the page
If you find that a page has been vandalised, it's easy to revert the page to the previous version.
Reverting means undoing all the changes made to a page. The result will be that the page becomes identical to how it used to be at some previous time.
- Click on "history" at the top of the page. Click on the time and date of the earlier version you want to revert to.
- When that page comes up, you'll see something like "(Revision as of 22:19 Aug 15, 2002)" below the title.
- Verify that you've selected the correct version, and click to edit the page, as you would normally.
- Important: in the case of vandalism, make sure that you're reverting to the last version without the vandalism; there may be multiple vandal edits.
- You'll get a warning, above the edit box, about editing an out-of-date revision.
- Save the page. Be sure to add the word "revert" and a brief explanation for the revert to the edit summary. You can abbreviate "revert" as "rv".
- Click on "history" again. A new line will have been added, and you'll be able to verify (by clicking on "last") that you undid the vandalism plus all subsequent bona fide edits, if any. (If you undid any real edits, please add them again.)
- Hint: In a vandalism case where sections of text were simply deleted and then subsequent edits were made by others, it may be easier for you to cut and paste those missing sections of text back in, than to revert and then re-do the edits.
Check the contribution history
Check the contribution history of the user who vandalized the article. (Click on their IP address or username.) The vandal may have vandalised other pages, and you can fix those too.
Post a warning message
Then post a warning message on the vandal's talk page, as seen below. There are templates for these -- you can just type in {{vandal-1}}, {{vandal-2}} or {{vandal-3}}, and then sign the message. Here are the three vandal messages:
Template:Vandal-1
Template:Vandal-2
Template:Vandal-3
It's also a good idea to post a sentence about which page was vandalized. Remember to sign and date your message by leaving four tildes (like this: ~~~~).