Wikipedia:WikiProject User warnings/Help:Introduction

Introduction

This page is is meant as an introduction to user warnings. If you would like more information on any particular subject, see the appropriate inline wikilinks. For a basic introduction to Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Introduction.

About warnings

Any edit deliberately intended to damage Wikipedia's content, attack a person, or oppose the community is termed vandalism. Particularly, edits which go against Wikipedia's policies and guidelines are generally considered vandalism

If you spot someone vandalising Wikipedia, you should revert their changes to a previous version. You can leave a message on their talk page to notify them that they've violated a policy or guideline, and that you've reverted their changes. There are various user warning templates available to simplify this by outputting automatic, standardised messages directly onto the talk page.

Using warnings

To use a user warning template, choose a standardised template from the main page of the WikiProject on User Warnings or a legacy template from Category:User warning templates. On the talk page you'd like to place the message on, type {{subst:name}}, where name is the name of the template. For example, if you want to use Template:test1, you can type {{subst:test1}}.

The "subst" causes the text of the template to be substituted into the page when you save it, rather than having the page link to the template every time it is viewed. The reason for doing this is that accessing the template each time the page is viewed leaves hundreds of pages (ironically) open to vandalism, since any edit to the template will then show up on every page the tag is placed on. Substituting the template text also reduces server load. For these reasons, user warning templates should always be substituted for text.

Every template has a family of about four levels, from a polite pointer to the sandbox to a stern demand that the user cease and desist or face the consequences. It's not necessary to start at the first level; rather, you should choose one based on how vicious the vandalism is. For example, {{test1}} is appropriate for someone who adds "Hi Joe!" to a page, whereas a rapid multiple-revert vandal should only be given one warning ({{test4}}).

After using warnings

If the user doesn't stop vandalising after being warned a few times, you can report him to administrators for intervention. To do so, you can either add his name to Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism or notify an admin on the Freenode IRC channel #wikipedia-en-vandalism. Note that both usually get the attention of an admin within minutes, often within seconds.

See also

• Category:User warning templates (Category of legacy templates)
• Template:TestTemplates (A table of legacy template families)
• Main list of user_talk templates
• Wikipedia:Dealing with vandalism