Recently I worked on a research project that was concerned with vandalism to libraries.  As part of this I came across articles that dealt with vandalism to Wikipedia.  Since this kind of related to digital collections I began to look into vandalism in Wikipedia and was surprised by how much the Wikipedia community had done to deal with and prevent vandalism to their articles.

Maybe because of the nature of Wikipedia, where anyone can add or edit articles, allows for the openness of this community to talk about something that other collections might try to hide or quickly correct to save face or prevent further damage.  Wikipedia has had a number of very public instances of vandalism including an instance where a picture of Pope Benedict was replaced with one of the evil emperor from Star Wars.  This has lead to many articles on Wikipedia being locked either permanently or restricted to only allow some established users to edit.

What really amazed me was that Wikipedia has basically put a call out to their users to keep an eye out for vandalism and to correct it if found. This is understanable considering the nature of the resource but I guess I didn’t think it would be such an organized effort as what I came across.   They have wiki’s dedicated to defining what is and is not considered vandalism and what steps should be taken if found.  This wiki on Wikipedia Vandalism is a good example of this type of information available to the community.  There have even been a number of vandalisim projects that have been undertaken by the community to identify how wide spread the problem is and who is vandalizing the articles.