OrbiterWiki:Policy
The Policy is something like the law for admins - it gives guidelines for how to handle situations which appear often. The policy itself is not a fixed law - the final saying on anything has the admin, which does the actions. All admins are encouraged to decide which actions are fitting better to a situation. The most important resource on the wiki is content - any activity which brings useful content should be appreciated, any activity which might discourage authors from working on articles should be stopped.
Vandalism
Minor vandalism
- Single nonsense lines
- Deletion of content or replacing it by nonsense.
Minor vandalism are small defacements of articles, which are not more sewere than maybe a single line or so. The best example of minor vandalism is the typical childish prank, like entering nonsense lines into articles.
Minor cases of vandalism by non-registered users should get punished by a one week ban after the second attempt. If the vandalism continues directly after the ban, the ban should be permanent.
In case of registered users, after the first attempt, the user should get warned on his talk page, that he is on the road to a ban, if he continues to vandalize.
Major vandalism
- Spam edits (eg links to Viagras sellers, etc)
- Massive defacements of multiple articles at once
- any attempt to bring pornography into this wiki, may it be by text, link or media.
Major vandalism gets automatically sanctioned by a permanent ban.
Deleting pages
A page must get deleted if
- Its first edit is an act of vandalism (spam, defacements)
- Its last 10 edits have been defacements
Merging pages
If two pages are about the same content (possible as we have case-sensitive titles), its encouraged to merge them into a single article.
Spambots
Automated spambots get instantly permanently banned.
You can identify automated spambots by reoccuring patters, eg using a <div> tag for hiding their spam in the articles, containing many links to doubtful pages.
Securing evidence
If an admin thinks that a new spambot pattern occurs, he should protect a single vandalized page as example (instead of directly deleting it) and notify the site owners. The site owners should document current filter patterns in the wiki for admins as reference. After the site owner updated the filter rules, the article should get deleted ASAP.