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There are three types of 'vandal:

  • the simple vandal who simply blanks pages or inserts obvious nonsense like "nyah nyah na nyah nyah" or "you are a troll" (only trolls can claim to be trolls, so, someone else calling you one is just fatuous compliment)
  • the sophisticated vandal who inserts credible-reading nonsense like false facts that seem almost right - if this is nonrandom then they may be a POV warrior or funded troll which is not vandalism but a genuine conflict on what sources to trust
  • the sysop vandal who exercises technological escalation and trust gained through doing routine tasks, to apply their poor editorial judgement, e.g. to ad hominem delete or IP block those whose philosophies aren't compatible with infinite tolerance of the Sysop Vandal point of view, i.e. that those who have technological power, are morally superior by definition.

Vandals as a faction

The Vandals are a de facto faction consisting of all IP numbers consistently used to do vandalism, whose editors seem to have no interest in becoming trolls. When trolls will not vouch for an edit, by whatever means they use to do that (it must be factionally defined by them alone), then it must be considered vandalism. Presumably this includes all insensible page replacement, graffiti-like "tagging", plain jokes, or simple page blanking. Lowest Troll can remove these from view, as soon as the trolls agree its vandalism.

Note that sysop vandalism and less visible developer vandalism is also possible. There is no reason to believe that sysops or developers never make an article less useful, or never engage in behaviour that degardes the corpus.

By incorporating vandals as a faction in themselves, one that is the only one whose edits are invisible, we achieve reflexive wiki management where no external "mailing list" or "IRC channel" or "special status" is required.

Huh? How are vandal edits invisible, unless they are deleted?--Juxo 22:28, 14 Jul 2004 (EEST)
That's exactly the point. Any faction (including sysops and other trolls) can revert/delete vandal edits. The definition of being in this faction is that your edits are invisible. ;-)