Seems like whenever somebody (not me ) messes with a wiki page, it's automatically corrected. How is this possible? Is it some kinda software or are there people constantly looking for that kind of stuff?

There are a myriad of automated "bots" that constantly prowl for "obvious" vandalism such as page-blanking, insertion of "ZOMG, LOLS" type of stuff, and phrases with lots of exclamation points, dirty words, or the like.

Blatant vandalism has largely been eradicated on Wikipedia. Only more insidious vandalism like the blatant POV-pushing of some Wikipedia editors is still actively practiced, and then only by those under the protection of admins.

What?

That's not true at all. There are numerous instances of blatant vandalism sticking to articles, and this is still going on all the time. As much now as it ever did before.

Well, I certainly haven't done a study, but the page-blanking is mostly gone, and it appears from a cursory examination of the recent changes log that virtually all of the obvious expletive-insertion stuff gets reverted quickly by bots, but I am sure there is more subtle actual vandalism (rather than POV-pushing) that happens -- I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek above.

But I stick to my contention that long-lived drive-by, middle-school style vandalism is much diminished compared to (e.g.) two years ago.

No, you'd never find a much-watched article about a United States Senator, for instance, to say he participated in kinky sex adventures in high school, with donkeys, no less.

There's just no way that could last 7.2 days and the page be viewed nearly 4,000 times in that span!

Couldn't happen. Impossible. Vastly diminished. Wikipedia is always improving.

Greg

I have many examples of vandalisms lasting months, but since I've been involved in the cleanup of most of the memorable ones (and very occasionally in the test-insertion of a few harmless ones to see how fast scientific jokes are caught) I cannot reveal them. But here's one I wasn't involved in. Somebody (user:Bunbury18, if you must know) who'd seen the movie Borat inserted the "fact" that Kazakhstan is the #1 exporter of potassium in the world, into the WP article on Potassium on Dec 12, 2006. It lasted 6 days before somebody caught it, removed it, and warned the user. This is a major science-related article.

Although there are a lot of bots, most vandalism reversion is done by people. Huggle can help revert things like that really fast. The problem is most people who use it are idiots and regularly revert things that aren't vandalism or will leave in vandalism because it's not obvious enough. It's a pretty boring job as well and most people who do it are just gunning for a huge edit count and to become admins.

But it's true - all other countries have inferior Potassium. It's right there in their national anthem.

It's automated. Some is almost totally automatic (page blanks, for example). Some of it you only need to verify and press a button.

See Wikipedia:RC_patrol#Monitoring

There is all sorts of automated software (10 different programs at least) which can identify potential vandalism. People running the software are notified of potential vandalism in more or less real-time and provided with a diff. If it is vandalism, they simply hit a button which reverts, comments, and automatically places a warning on the user's talk page. It even keeps track of how many warnings a user has had.

For more hands-on reverting, IRC chat users can go to the #wikipedia-en-vandalism channel (it may have moved, either way it is now private). An automated system posts notifications of potential vandalism in the channel. Mozilla plug-in scripts also help automate the process.

In other words, no one is really actively searching for vandals. It is identified by computer.