Vandalize Tab

[Granville Turley]

In2010, I discovered a Little Free Library. I fought an overwhelming, joyful urge to sprint up to this tiny box of books and hug it. (I later lost the fight and I actually did hug that Little Library).

I set out to shed some light on the culprits behind Little Free Library vandalism. I talked to several stewards who had dealt with vandalism, and each one actually discovered who had committed the crime.

Sage Holbein was one of the first people to ever put a Little Free Library in her front yard. She lives in inner-city Minneapolis, in a neighborhood with a lot of low-income housing and transient residents. Sage was worried about vandalism at first, and she was right to be worried; her Library did get vandalized. Several times.

In perhaps one of the most disgusting acts of vandalism to-date, steward Nancy Bartell came out to her Library a few months ago to find out that someone had . . . ahem . . . defecated inside a book, and put it in her Library. Well, Nancy caught the culprits on video and yes, it was teenage boys.

Just a few weeks ago steward Sue Torf discovered that her Library, installed along a popular hiking trail in her area, had been completely destroyed. Actually, it had been blown up, and Sue had proof. The two teenage boys who did it filmed themselves and posted the video publicly on Instagram.

The thing to remember when a Little Free Library gets vandalized is that the community gets a chance to respond to the incident. In most cases, there is an immediate outpouring of support and goodwill from friends, neighbors and people who just want to help.

Steward Carol Campbell has a Library in what she describes as an inner-city, high-poverty neighborhood. Her Library has been vandalized several times, and it was completely destroyed at one point. A drunk driver crashed into the fence where her Library was installed, and smashed the Library (and fence) to pieces.

Time and and time again, I am encouraged by the support and connections forged in the wake of a tragedy like a destroyed Little Free Library. While we have stories of vandalism in our blog, most of them have an unexpected trait in common: a happy ending. Take this story of a stolen Library in Kentucky as an example; or this story of how a small town steward bounced back from vandalism by two teenage girls; or this story of neighbors banding together to support a local steward.

The original song is from One Okay Rock called vandalize. In the original song it says F*ck the pain way my bed is in ruins, and here you can hear the cut lol. It's kind of funny if you think about the song having a curse word in it.

Sound the alarm Shatter me like glass Covered in scars But roses are coming through the cracks Time that you killed You promised to help me rebuild It caught me off guard Sound the alarm Said you'd keep me safe, now you're tearing me down

Yesterday, I noticed that one of the non-salvageable questions I had contributed towards closure was edited to no longer include its original content (it was something along the lines of "I just searched over the internet and found the answers that I was looking for"). I reverted the edit and posted a comment to warn that this isn't good conduct for the site. The reply ended up not being so good.

Of course, one could draw some various remarks from this exchange. The comment was terser than the OP had wished. I also know that I did not have to comment, and that I'm bound to find toxicity sooner or later from this. I never really checked my brain's volume either.

However, I would like to focus on the word "vandalizing". Saying that the question or answer was vandalized did not strike me as something directly insulting to say. In fact, it's often employed for this sort of issue here on Meta, and my own comment was based on one which is publicly hosted in a list for automatic comments. The original would have read like this:

Please do not vandalize your posts. By posting on the Stack Exchange network, you've granted a non-revocable right for SE to distribute that content (under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license). By SE policy, any vandalism will be reverted.

Given the circumstances, and just to be sure: is it appropriate to use the word "vandalize" or its variants for inappropriate modifications to questions and answers? What other ways can we portray the same meaning, or warn the user not to do this?

"Vandalising" is a perfectly appropriate word to describe many (most, I hazard) instances of post defacement. That said, O.O.Balance and BDL have a point in that in this specific case (a closed question with no answers that, I presume, wasn't a blatant homework dump) the OP deserved the benefit of the doubt, as, going by your description, it looked more like a misunderstanding than willful destruction. A comment like this, accompanied by a rollback, would probably have been enough:

While the usage of this word is perfectly valid here; bear in mind that it possesses a pejorative connotation. In the end, the OP just innocently wanted others to know he found a solution. He didn't want to deliberately destroy his question.

I see no reason to change your wording based on these events.

We shouldn't be "Less confrontational" every single time some ignorant user blows a comment way out of proportion.

We can't please everyone, and you can't prevent anyone from feeling insulted over trivial matters. Stop adapting to extremes like that.

would have achieved the same goal without threatening them with licensing terms. Your current comment reads (at least to me) as "You've done something terrible bad and if you violate our license again we will sue you.". No wonder the OP didn't take it that well.

Pointing someone to the license is (IMHO) only appropriate when you feel that someone removed content to prevent it from being found (e.g. homework help that shouldn't be found) or when someone really insists on removing content. Not when someone misunderstood how the site works.

The Vandals were a large East Germanic tribe or group of tribes that first appear in history inhabiting present-day southern Poland. Some later moved in large numbers, including most notably the group which successively established kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula and then North Africa in the 5th century.

The modern English words "vandal", and "vandalism" are directly derived from the name of the Vandal tribes. Presumably the tribes were doing what a lot of other groups were doing at the time, but the losers in history are always recorded as the villains.

If the concept of Political Correctness had existed in the 6th Century then, yes, I could agree that some people could have found the pejorative use of the word offensive at the time. It's the 21st Century now - I don't think we have to be worried.

The assertion "you have a small brain" is juvenile and absolutely irrelevant. It is probable that the author of the juvenile response did not know that vandalism was a "technical term" used by people with "medium sized brains" and was mistakenly "responding in kind".

On Wikipedia, vandalism has a very specific meaning: editing (or other behavior) deliberately intended to obstruct or defeat the project's purpose, which is to create a free encyclopedia, in a variety of languages, presenting the sum of all human knowledge.

The malicious removal of encyclopedic content, or the changing of such content beyond all recognition, without any regard to our core content policies of neutral point of view (which does not mean no point of view), verifiability and no original research, is a deliberate attempt to damage Wikipedia. There, of course, exist more juvenile forms of vandalism, such as adding irrelevant obscenities or crude humor to a page, illegitimately blanking pages, and inserting obvious nonsense into a page. Abusive creation or usage of user accounts and IP addresses may also constitute vandalism.

Vandalism is prohibited. While editors are encouraged to warn and educate vandals, warnings are by no means a prerequisite for blocking a vandal (although administrators usually only block when multiple warnings have been issued).

When OPs decide that an overblown reaction to a post has occurred, including agrumentum ad hominem, the OPs may want that post deleted as noncontributory to the site. The arguments presented in this stream suggest that although OPs have authored posts, they are vandals with respect to their own words even if they are victims of mob action because they further have no ownership of their words; the site owns them.

Somehow something is lacking in the argument. A reputation is yours to lose, but the site owns its impolite action with respect to you. This seems to be an antidemocratic approach to contribution and a turnoff.

So in cases like this, assume good intentions on the part of the OP instead, and explain why the edit was not in the spirit of the site. Or just link them to the tour page. Keep in mind, you do not have to engage with people in that way at all. Rolling back the edit is perfectly fine on its own (leaving a short, neutral revision comment to the effect that you restored the question is probably warranted though).

Even though the response on your comment wasn't appropriate, attacking it is not logical and seems like the typical strawman argument.. Rather try to solve the problem and avoid people misinterpreting the word "vandalizing" in the future I'd say. Communication is always 2 way traffic.

I don't think 'Vandalism' was an appropriate word here. You had a part in closing the question as unsalvagable, right? How does the question any longer have a value? You and others had already decided to throw it onto the SO trash heap.

While the edit certainly didn't improve the value of what was posted and caused more work for the edit review queue, I wouldn't say that it decreased the value either, or it shouldn't have been closed as non-salvageable. It's the difference between spray painting a smiley face on your neighbor's car hood, or on a rusted old hood laying in a ditch somewhere.

3a8082e126