Help:Patrolling

Patrolling is an action that can only be done by patrollers and administrators, and the action can only be tracked through the patrol log. In this way, it can be difficult to know when to patrol edits or even what to do with the patroller user group. This help page assumes you are a patroller and that you recently got promoted.

It's pretty easy to find edits to patrol, but a good way to get started is to enable the "revision patrol" gadget in your preferences. This allows you to see which edits are patrolled from edit histories, revision pages, and altogether will make patrolling easier.

Next, you can try patrolling edits from recent changes. Being a patroller enables a whole new set of filters for recent changes: review status. This allows you to filter changes based on whether they're manually patrolled, automatically patrolled, or not yet patrolled. This allows you to patrol more effectively, since you can simply enable "unpatrolled" and then you can see only edits that need to be reviewed.

There are actually four total patrol statuses that an edit can be: Manually patrolled, unpatrolled, autopatrolled, and unpatrollable. Unpatrollable means the edit is over 90 days old and cannot be patrolled. This occurs since patrolling edits only concerns recent edits, so if an edit is unconstructive, not reverted, and not patrolled, then patrolling has already failed anyway.

To get started, go to Special:RecentChanges and turn on the unpatrolled filter. Then you can check recent edits and make it easier for other patrollers to find edits that might need correction or reverting.

Make sure an edit is okay before marking it as patrolled. When it involves information that you can't verify, then leave it to someone else. If there's grammar that is bad, then go ahead and go fix it.

If a vandalistic edit has been reverted, then that means it's been acted on and is okay to be marked. Same goes for edits with bad grammar that has been fixed.

Can't find how to mark the page creation as patrolled? No worries. Scroll to the bottom of the page's current revision. There should be a "Mark this page as patrolled" button in a nice little box. Click that and the page creation will be marked as patrolled. This also exists for files, but with "file" on the button rather than "page".

Userspace edits don't have to be checked for accuracy or formatting, so generally edits to one's own userspace can be marked patrolled without checking it closely or requiring any action. Just keep an eye on possible vandalism to revert. It is good to get userspace edits marked patrolled to clear out the list of unpatrolled edits in recent changes so that possible vandalism doesn't get hidden under a deluge of non-mainspace edits. However, make sure to check for edits that violate rules that userspace is not exempt from, namely, no personal attacks.

The patrol log can be used to see recent patrolling activity from all patrollers.

When a bad edit comes into the feed, you'll be able to rollback the edit. If the edit is plain vandalism, then the regular rollback button is okay to use, but using the custom rollback edit summary can be good to explain reverts, which is useful when a user might not know what they did wrong.

To put the whole thing simply, rollbacking will revert all the latest edits by one user until it finds one by another user. It will not revert any edits except those by the one user. When rollbacking, make sure all the diffs need reverting, and not just the latest of, say, two. In that case the undo button would work better. Make sure you provide an edit summary for good faith edits or anything other than blatant vandalism.

The rollback tool is quite useful for quickly reverting edits, especially for multiple vandalistic edits in a row by the same user. Basically, it reverts all edits by the same user until it finds an edit by another user. For instance, if the same user made a few bad edits to a page and no one else has edited that page between or after their edits, clicking rollback will revert all those edits. For a single edit, the undo button might suffice, but it also could be quicker to rollback it.

Essentially, there are four approaches to new edits:

1. Mark the edit as patrolled
2. Correct the edit that might have bad grammar or some false info
3. Leave the edit to someone else
4. Revert the edit

Edits should be marked as patrolled when you're sure they're ok. Edits can be corrected if they're largely okay, but may contain factual, syntax, or grammatical errors. Leave edits to someone else if you are unsure what to do. Revert the edit if it's unconstructive, making sure to not bite the newbies and use the correct method of reverting (if you have gotten this far in wiki editing to get the patroller right, you likely know all the technicalities and guidelines on reverting edits).

Also note that rollbacking edits will mark edits as automatically patrolled.