Help:Patrolled edit

MediaWiki Handbook: Contents, Readers, Editors, Moderators, System admins +/-

A feature introduced in MediaWiki 1.4 is Patrolled edits. Patrolling edits is a way to indicate that the edit is beneficial, and to aid collaboration on filtering spam and vandalism. In the recent changes list, if you see an article which is good, you can mark it as "patrolled" so that other users know that it is good and do not necessarily have to re-check it.

Policies may vary among projects whether an article can be marked as patrolled if it is not obvious vandalism, or only when the correctness has been verified.

Patrolled edits

Patrolled edits are restricted to administrators in most Mediawiki projects, or other groups with the autopatrol right. Users with the patrol right can also patrol the edits of others, as demonstrated below.

After clicking 'diff' on a change in Special:Recentchanges, you may see a link at the bottom, similar to the one below.

In the Recent Changes, an unpatrolled edit looks like this:

(diff) (hist) . . ! Help:Patrolled edit; 23:28 . . Astronouth7303 (talk | contribs | block)

While a patrolled one would be like this:

(diff) (hist) . . Help:Patrolled edit; 23:28 . . Astronouth7303 (talk | contribs | block)

Note: The “block” link is only visible when logged on to an account with sysop rights.

Patrolled pages

File:ExamplePatrol.png

An example showing the patrol feature.

Most Wikimedia projects disabled MediaWiki's standard recent changes patrolling and use a different system of patrolling new pages rather than each individual edit, called new pages patrolling (which from a strictly technical perspective is just a subset of recent changes patrolling). Unpatrolled new pages are highlighted in yellow. All autoconfirmed users (normally any account older than 4 days with at least 10 edits) can mark a page as patrolled.

Any page that is highlighted in yellow in Special:NewPages and has the (!) colored symbol in Special:RecentChanges has not yet been marked as patrolled. This means that it may not have been reviewed. When you check the page, you should mark it as patrolled if (a) you see that it is a good page or (b) before you tag it for deletion. If you are not sure about what to do with a page, do not mark it as patrolled; another editor will review it later.

To mark a page as patrolled, simply click the "[Mark this page as patrolled]" link that appears at the bottom right corner of any new page.

Example:

[Mark this page as patrolled]

Note that this link only appears when the article is opened through the link to it at new pages; the link will not show for unpatrolled new pages accessed from elsewhere.<ref>See bugzilla:15936.</ref>

Other notes

A log of all patrols can be seen at Special:Log/patrol. It includes usernames, articles, and the revision reviewed, and may be sorted by username or by article title.
Pages created by administrators, bots and autopatrollers are automatically marked as patrolled.
You cannot mark your own page creations as patrolled.
There is a "Hide patrolled edits" option on Special:NewPages so that you can ignore pages that have already been reviewed.
Even when the last few hours or even days have all been patrolled, there is still a big backlog and some patrollers prefer to patrol from the back of the queue. Pages expire from the unpatrolled queue after 720 hours (30 days).<ref>That is, $wgRCMaxAge.</ref>

Classes

There are two class attributes related to patrolled edits:

The class for non-patrolled articles in Special:Newpages is .not-patrolled, so colorblind users or users who prefer a different style can, for example, add .not-patrolled { border: 2px solid black } to their user CSS files.
The class for the "Mark this page as patrolled" link in the lower-right corner of each new page is .patrollink, you can style it in your user CSS file, for example: .patrollink { font: bold small sans-serif}