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Wikipedia:Requests for investigation

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Heron (talk | contribs) at 19:58, 17 March 2003 (update). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The purpose of this page is to provide instant notice of vandalism taking place. You can use the format under the Current Alerts heading: IP address, pages touched, damage done. If you don't want to call attention to your report, be sure to check the box marked "this is a minor edit" (so it won't show up in most users' recent changes).

For a list of currently blocked IPs and the reason why they were blocked, visit: Special:Ipblocklist.

If you would like to look up information about the vandal's IP please visit http://network-tools.com/ and enter in the IP.

However, please do not label isolated instances of text deletions, replacements or odd additions as VANDALISM unless they are overtly lewd or offensive. More often than not, this is just a visitor to the site experimenting with how to use it -- labeling them as a VANDAL is a sure way of ensuring they will not become contributors. Only add alerts to this page of true VANDALISM such as a systematic attack on several articles. Above all, please be polite at first and give the person the benefit of the doubt until they prove they deserve otherwise.

If you disagree with someone's edits, please see the following pages:

Current alerts

Note: Please add new alerts at the top of this list.

  • Incoming: tide of graffiti and article deletion. Target articles are random (see Lamarck for recent example. User URLs are also many and varied (207.63.213.194 was the one responsible for Lamarck). -- Heron Oh, and some of my repairs are getting overwritten. -- ditto
  • 202.129.95.21 is vandalising all articles that have anything to do with Greece, adding "Greek scum" and the like. All his edits need to be reverted but my connection is very slow right now and I can't do it. An IP block should be considered. Tannin 15:13 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)
  • 216.213.225.6 appears to be adding obscenities to Commedia dell'arte and deleting content from that page. -- IHCOYC 17:39 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)
    • Other vandalistic activities elsewhere from same user. The Anome 17:41 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)
  • 66.120.230.4 placed - FUCKING THIS THIS IS FUCKING GAY,TURN THAT FUCKING GAY ASS MUSIC Off at the bottom of Henry VIII of England. It was his first wiki contribution so far (done about half an hour ago) but s/he is worth keeping an eye on. STÓD/ÉÍRE 02:53 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)


  • AlbertJacherHolyProphet has been adding sily self-promotion to articles having anything to do with religion and vandalising user pages. Tannin 03:14 Mar 13, 2003 (UTC)
    • Second that. He needs to be taken in hand. -- Zoe
    • A web search reveals that Albert Jacher has his own newsgroup (alt.religion.albertanism), which is archived on Google and even has some posts written by people other than him. He also has a website with a number of mirrors, and a modest net presence, especially in polish language. Perhaps we should allow him to start an article or two? It will be very hard to maintain NPOV, of course, and once he's here he might make annoying additions to other religion articles, but our number one goal should be to avoid suppressing real content. -- Tim Starling 04:33 Mar 13, 2003 (UTC)
We had all of those Fifth World posers here for a while, and we finally managed to get rid of them. They had their own fantasy websites, too. Do we want Wikipedia to turn into a place for every made-up religion to put an article? -- Zoe
To the best of my knowledge, all religions are made-up, so that is not a criterion for exclusion. But a following beyond a couple of people, and/or a, however modest, historical significance could be set as a requirement. -- Egil 05:21 Mar 13, 2003 (UTC)
I think it's an excellent criterion for exclusion! Let's delete the lot! -- Tarquin 10:43 Mar 13, 2003 (UTC) ;-)
  • 208.214.188.62 surfaces every few months to add obscenities and/or meaningless drivel to random articles. Deb 21:44 Mar 11, 2003 (UTC)
  • 194.207.237.26 and .27 has been vandalising a number of articles and creating new junk articles. March 10, 2003
He's using .28 as well. Ams80 11:54 Mar 10, 2003 (UTC)
  • Michael has been persistently editing the Talk:Crass page, attributing abusive comments to myself and camembert to a level that is arguably vandalism quercus robur 19:41 Mar 8, 2003 (UTC)
  • 142.177.xxx.xxx has been banned from Wikipedia. He constantly edits with different IPs in the 142.177 range so blocking any particular IP is of little long-term use. Jimbo has stated that edits made by this user can be reverted on sight. --mav 21:32 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)
  • 205.188* - someone with rotating IP addresses attacking several pages, including my User page. -- Zoe
    • I've blocked 205.188.209.69 because that one address was repeatedly fabricating talk on Talk:1750. The same user has several other IP numbers, however. They seem to have gone away for now, anyway. --Camembert 03:28 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)
    • Might want to unblock them after a while, though. I've heard that they are AOL proxies.... - User:Ixfd64
    • You haven't just heard that they are AOL proxies, they are AOL proxies. FYI, both the currently blocked (64.12.0.0 - 64.12.255.255) and the (205.188.0.0 - 205.188.255.255) are AOL.



  • 68.147.132.247 was replacing articles with junk at a fast rate. I've blocked the IP. -- Tarquin 18:56 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)


  • A vandal is removing a lot of text at Meta Wikipedia - help needed, preferably from someone with sysop powers on meta. Enchanter 23:44 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)
    • The IP is now banned on meta; affected pages are already cleaned up. Just added Eloquence and Enchanter as sysops on meta. --Brion 00:00 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)
Banned per your request. Vicki Rosenzweig 21:16 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

I think the MIT vandal may be back. User:Sumar made subtle changes to Eton College and Yanomami in the style of the MIT vandal. Mintguy

  • User:Popas11 is wreaking havoc over a wide number of pages, including my talk page. Appears to be a script.


OK this is really serious. Let us ban the user IMMEDIATELY. olivier 11:51 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)
You give me his IP number and I'll be more than happy to do it. Otherwise the only other tool I have is a semi-automated revert tool. So just let this guys vandalism pile up and I'll periodically revert them all. --mav 11:54 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)
It would require a revision to the Wiki software, but why not include an option so that anyone can look up the IP address of any Wikipedia username? Or would that be considered too risky for the users in general? -- Modemac

Yes, vandalism in progress and you should all know that the one who was responsible for this outburst of rage is Maveric aka mav who abused his rights and sided in edit war abot women, instead of helping to mediate. With such ads, you will always have plenty of vandalism here. I will not stop until he appologizes for his behaviour - the more you fight me, the more spiteful I will be.

Your VANDAL. Bolero

Your edits to begin with were vandalism. Wikipedia is not a place to text anarchy. --mav
  • User:Annetit's additions to Woman seem to fall into the category of vandalism, rather than a serious dispute over content, and Annetit does not answer queries about them. The article in question will need more monitoring than I alone can give it. --- Someone else 07:48 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)
    • Annetit is now out of control, vandalizing page after page since Woman was locked. -- Zoe 08:52 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)
    • Yes - will somebody PLEASE stop this person? Thanks.
    • I agree. Annetit's recent contributions seem to be pure vandalism. -- The Anome 09:00 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)
    • Someone, presumably Annetit, has become a hydra-headed vandal, repeatedly creating new logins to do the same sort of vandalism. Attempts at constructive engagement seem to have failed. IP ban requested. The Anome 09:36 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)
    • The IP of Annetit is user:18.21.0.98 - see history of user talk:18.21.0.98 and hir contributions.
  • 203.37.199.12 can't leave Loch Ness monster alone
Possibly mutating to 203.37.199.13 Ducker 23:15 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)
  • 64.180.70.230 has vandalized maveric and camembert's user pages. -- Zoe 04:18 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)
What a moron: doesn't he even know how to spell WHEE for 75Kb?

"Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" is Yugo-Slav Macedonia ! The Slavs are Macedonians with greek history and symbols? Is it not history Vandalism? ?? Macedonian-Greek !10.03.2003 - 62.47.35.138

  • 217.41.37.98 wiped the Cheese article and replaced it with "cheese smells bad".
  • 24.42.43.3 is making redirects, wiping whole articles in the process.
  • 68.45.38.248 appears to be adding a pantheon of made-up Star Wars characters: "Good Vader", "Bad Vader", "Jedi Divas" etc. These all fail the Google test.
  • Very disturbing edits are made by a contributor called User:Pacifica (calling herself "Diana Couto Secreatary of State") not registered, to the Pacifica article (another micronation). See also the discussion page. Is it possible to trace and issue a warning to this user? olivier 14:34 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)
I have issued a warning on Talk:Pacifica. olivier 14:41 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)


65.56.131.110 is vandalizing other pages too. Hard to keep up... -- Wapcaplet
I blocked the user. It's a dynamic IP adress he uses so he might come back. -- JeLuF 01:14 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)
  • There is cracker using the login and password of other sysops on the French Wiki. Can anyone remove all sysop powers, since the vandal managed to use youssefsan,anthere and athimik's login (they are all sysops). So the damages could be very unpleasant. There nearly nobody on the French Wiki. Regards-- Youssefsan
    On account of this I've cleared all login sessions. I strongly recommend that anyone with an account on the French wikipedia change their password there (and here and elsewhere, if using the same password). I have reset the passwords of all the French sysops, who will need to manually change via 'mail password'. --Brion 21:43 Jan 1, 2003 (UTC)


Last time I checked wikipedia wasn't doing a very good job of even attempting to hide passwords Vera Cruz
WHat do you mean Vera Cruz -- Youssefsan
Our passwords are not encrypted and can be be viewed as regular text via a man in the middle crack. Brion has already mentioned that he was working on fixing this. --mav
Interception of unencrypted packets is possible, though not terribly likely unless your ISP and/or your government are trying to vandalize Wikipedia. More exploitable problems are cookie-sniffing (stored password or just the session cookie) and SQL access by a malicious sysop peeking at the user table (this last is now closed, with finer-grained permissions on the sql access). These wouldn't give a plaintext password, but the hash or session is about as good. --Brion 23:17 Jan 1, 2003 (UTC)
I would recommend using one-way encryption for maximum security. - User:Ixfd64
  • Not content with self-promotion, 172.135.234.60 has progressed to is vandalising user pages.
  • 24.245.54.233 is on a vandalism spree. Page deletions, replacing articles by inappropriate material -- IP ban requested.
  • I have unblocked the IP addresses 142.177.*, which are used by a permanently banned user ("24"), as the bans may affect other users using the same large ISP. The bans can and will be reinstated if necessary in future. Enchanter
  • Some people believe regard what Taku is doing a as being vandalism. Taku 04:11 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC) (and we aren't even talking about what Taku does to the english language!)

Vandalism alert. Dutch supremacists appear to be denying the existence of Flemish, and making out that Belgium has Dutch as an official language. PML.

There is no "vandalism". Dutch is a official language of Belgium. Giskart 10:50 Mar 13, 2003 (UTC) (wikipedia NL)
It is my understanding that that is the "Dutch supremacist" view, i.e. that is a view held by the Dutch of the Belgians but not by the Belgians themselves. That is, the dialects are further apart than some acknowledged different languages (though this usually shows in languages using different scripts) and also closer together than some different dialects of languages acknowledged to be the same, but if you ask the Flemish whether they speak Flemish or Dutch they will say Flemish. It is not an assertion about closeness of dialects but allowing about cultural references to be made via language; to deny "Flemish" exists is to prevent people being able to use it for reference purposes - weird when more European culture got transmitted via Flemish than via Dutch. Nobody would be able to find out about a wide range of things from the Middle Ages. When I can, I will get a definitive opinion from a Belgian source, on the principle that the Dutch should not say what other people can or cannot be or use, then cite it here by way of substantiation. PML.
The question is very simple. Is Dutch a official language of Belgium? I, a Dutch speaking Belgian say it is. Every reference work will say that also. The official website of Belgium say that also. Possibly some Flemish people will say the speak "Flemish". That makes it not an official language. To say the Dutch is not a official language is a not true. I have enough work on my home wikipedia. It is up to the English to deal whit this Australian (PML) Ik wil het wel verder bespreken op Wikipedia NL, in het Nederlands. Giskart 08:26 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)
I said, I would check and get back with an official view in due course. What I will be looking for is an official view relating to Belgian sources and cultural continuity. The thing is, if someone starts from (say) a course assignment asking about Til Eulenspiel he is going to get all sorts of mentions of Flemish - not just Dutch - so that the accurate statement that the two peoples are effectively speaking the same thing will not make the right connections. I for one see no problem in pointing out that the languages are effectively the same while still using the two different words in the reference material - but I will go and see what the sources say. If modern sources say they are they are now the same, well, that is not the point; what counts is what references and links people can follow. I will go with references that say there was only ever Dutch in Flanders, if I find them - but if I find the opposite, I will draw it to Wikipedia's attention in support of the idea that censoring out "Flemish" is a distortion. But don't start in on me for drawing the issue out in the first place. And don't get the idea that what is happening now is what counts for a reference work that is supposed to work when it spans various eras. PML.

Dutch supremacism very bad ne! Dutch learned ketjap-making from Japanese. Japanese deny ketjap is from Javanese! ち き

tsukoshi, Anglo-Saxon the real supremacist one, is it true? Anglo-Saxon deny existence of them self! ち き

you want Belgium historical site, directs it to Amsterdam adults site, smart ne! ち き


Note: Please add new alerts at the top of this list.