[WikiEN-l] Template vandalism: some useful tools

[Andrew Gray]

There's been a bit of a spate of template vandalism recently, and as a
result a discussion on the village pump over whether or not to
(semi)protect chunks of the template namespace by default - those with
views on the matter might want to drop by there.

Anyway, I wanted to mention a couple of helpful tools for dealing with
template vandalism when you find it.

a) If you look at the bottom of the edit page, there's a list of all
templates transcluded in the article, so you can open these and have a
look. It also mentions if they're protected or not - if not, and it's
widely used, this might be a good time to do so. [Obvious, I know, but
it took me a long time to notice them down there...]

b) This toolserver page -
http://toolserver.org/~cbm/cgi-bin/queries/TemplateRevs?page=Example -
will give you a list of the single most recent change made to every
template transcluded in that article, in this case [[Example]] (a very
template-light page)

Once you've found it, of course, you can clean up any other templates
that have been hit and block the user - but sometimes they switch IPs.
How best to find their next target? An old standby...

c) If all else fails, the holistic overview -
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&hideliu=1&namespace=10
- the template namespace isn't *that* busy, and it's possible to skim
it by hand looking for large changes.

Hope this may be of some help...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
 andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk