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Friends of gays should not be allowed to edit articles

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From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This contains material intended to be humorous . It should not be taken seriously or literally.

One of the biggest problems on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is vandalism . By this, we mean the introduction of non-sequiturs into articles and pages promoting their product, (lack of) typing skills, opinion, genitalia size, sports team or, indeed, the sexual orientation of their friends. Vandalism constitutes a serious weakening of a wiki's moral fibre.

Vandalism is an important issue; it drains literally minutes of valuable time each day from more dedicated contributors, who could be spending that time in more productive pursuits, such as Minesweeper or watching educational videos. Several suggestions have been made to identify types of editors that are more likely to commit vandalism than others; see Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles for one such idea.

The problem with most of the suggested blocking strategies is that they don't accurately identify vandals. It is apparent that we need to analyze content of vandalism edits to understand who vandals are. This is the only way we can get a fine-grained blocking mechanism that allows legitimate editors to work with pages, while preventing those most likely to vandalize from having access to our system.

Types of vandals

A systematic analysis of vandalized pages on Wikipedia has turned up the following six categories of potential vandals:

Friends of gays . The most active group of vandals is, unfortunately, overly proud friends and acquaintances of gays and lesbians. While being proud of one's gay acquaintances isn't necessarily a negative characteristic, Wikipedia is not the place to publicly announce a friend's sexual orientation or proclivities. Some examples:<br>"BRANDON IS GAY"

"Judy Anderson is a lesbian!"

Typing students<br>Typing students . Many instances of vandalism show the telltale sign of typing students abusing Wikipedia to practice their home-row keyboard technique. Although editing wiki pages is an educational pursuit, we are not here to provide a blank white page for prospective stenographers. Typical examples:<br>"asdfasdfgjkl;asdfasdfjkl;;lkj"

"aaaaaasssssddddddffffff"

This type of vandalism should be undone immediately, or Wikipedia will run out of these letters. However, some of these users may in fact be pets or babies with access to keyboards, and it may be important to grok their attempted contributions.<br>The curious . Another community of vandals are curious people. These individuals ignore the sandbox and misuse the main namespace of Wikipedia to investigate their questions about wiki in general and web browsers in particular. This is the wrong forum for such experimentation because, as we all know, Wikipedia is for people who are already certain about everything. Some examples of vandalism by the curious:<br>"Does this really work?"

"TEST TEST TEST TEST"

"Just seeing if this actually works."

"Why am I allowed to write here?"

Critics . People who hate things shouldn't be allowed within ten kilometers of the edit button. Thanks to the NPOV policy, Wikipedians can't have opinions, even outside Wikipedia; otherwise, they might develop a habit of having a point of view, which is evil.[citation needed] Examples of critical vandalism include:<br>"THIS FILM SUCKS DICK."

"CLOUD IS DUMB!"

"JAR JAR BINKS IS THE WORST CHARACTER SINCE QUI-GON JINN...OH WAIT..."

"this book is stupid and i hate reading it cuz i have a test on it tomorrow"

A subcategory of the above category are devoted to providing similar helpful criticism about Wikipedia and other projects. Examples include:<br>"Wikipedia is fake!"

"Wikipedia sucks 'cause anyone can edit it"

Men with big penises . There seems to be a proliferation of editors who have enormous equipment. Some edit in the third person, so it's hard to tell if the editor is, himself, bragging, or if it might be his girlfriend, or just somebody who has been impressed while changing in the shower room. While having the largest penis in the world may be something to see a doctor about, there is nothing that anyone at Wikipedia can do to assist you. That is, until such time that someone writes an article on penis reduction techniques, which, if the number of people with alleged gigantic penises is any indication, will be very popular and widely read and acted upon.

Cheerleaders . Pom-pom wielding young ladies tend to proudly announce how awesome they are, as well as their team, their school, their friends, and even their country as if they're mistaking Wikipedia for their mega phone. They also like to add things like smiley faces and hearts to make articles look...