SmashWiki:Bad faith

Bad faith is the act of editing any SmashWiki article with malicious intent, be it inserting obscene or incorrect information into pages, deliberate refusal to obey guidelines and policies, or disruptive behaviour on forums and talk pages. Bad faith editors pose a significant risk to the reputation, accuracy, and integrity of the site, and as such is taken very seriously on SmashWiki.

Dealing with bad faith
When dealing with counter-productive or suspicious activity on the site, it is of course essential to initially assume good faith, unless the nature of the activity can be viewed beyond reasonable doubt as being malicious in intent. Depending on the situation at hand, there are two main courses of action that users should take:

For ambiguous cases
If it is unclear whether or not malicious intent is involved, the first course of action should always be to clearly and politely issue a warning to the user in question on their talk page. If the behaviour in question continues, a more stern warning should be given, and finally should the behaviour show no sign of stopping, an administrator may issue a block for the user, although this can be done at an earlier stage if deemed appropriate.

For blatant offenses
When it is clear that the intent of the user in question is malicious, such as if they are clearly vandalising articles or creating spam pages, the first action should be to immediately revert any malicious edits made by the user, and to tag spam pages with the speedy deletion template:. It is also important to alert the administrators in the Discord server and on the admin noticeboard about the user and their activities, leaving a brief description of their offense, with notification on Discord being preferred to guarantee a faster response. In the event that an administrator is not around at the time, users should continue to revert the malicious edits made by the user until such time that an administrator is available. Users should not proceed to interact with malicious users at any time.

Vandalism
Any edit that is considered to have been made to intentionally compromise SmashWiki's integrity is considered an act of vandalism. It is important to note that the insertion of false information may not necessarily be as an act of vandalism, but may simply be a mistake on the part of the editor. In most cases, there is a clear difference between vandalizing an article and inadvertently or unintentionally adding incorrect or inappropriate material. For example, if one were to edit the Mr. Game & Watch (SSBM) article and add a line of text suggesting that Judgment is the most powerful attack in the game (due to the chance of dealing a one-hit KO when performing the move), that would be considered good faith, not vandalism; however, an edit of the article to read "Mr. Gay & Watch is the suckiest character in Melee" quite clearly would be. In the event of the former, the edit should be reverted, with a clear explanation of why the edit was incorrect/inappropriate, while in the event of the latter, it should be considered deliberate bad faith.

Spam
The creation of pages for the sole purpose of promoting a product or service, or the insertion of such promotion into articles is considered to be spam. Self-promotion is not tolerated on the wiki, however it is important to consider that in some cases the user in question may not be aware that they are violating policy. In the case of creating spam pages containing malicious links or blatant promotion of a product, the page should be blanked and tagged for speedy deletion. Such behaviour should be regarded as deliberate bad faith.

Ignoring warnings
Often users will, initially in good faith, insert information or possess certain editing patterns which are deemed unhelpful, unconstructive, or unnecessary. Examples of this may include inserting speculative information on pages, or inserting information that is irrelevant or inappropriate to the article. In the event of this occurring, a clear and friendly warning should be issued to the user as stated above. However, in some cases the user in question will continue such behaviour in spite of warnings given to them. Should it become clear after multiple warnings that the user in question has no interest in listening to these warnings, then their behaviour can be considered to constitute as bad faith, and intervention from an administrator may be necessary.

Other examples
Other examples of unproductive behavior may include:
 * Refusal to cooperate with and respect other users on the site.
 * Harassment or hostility towards specific users on the site.
 * Any other behavior which violates policies on the site.