WikiIndex:RecentChanges patrol

WikiIndex: RecentChanges patrol – this page here on  is for those folks who want to patrol recent changes to swap tips, share experiences, ask questions, and coordinate any collaboration that needs to happen. This is a work in progress. Please help!

If you find vandalism or spam, it's quite easy to revert it. Click the 'history' tab on the vandalised or spammed page, then click the date and time of the last 'good' revision before the vandalism. Edit that (no need to actually modify anything) noting something like "rv/vandalism" or whatever your reason for reverting is in the edit summary, then save the page. Users with sysop rights will see a 'revert' button which reverts and notes something like "Reverted edit of X back to last version by X."

If you're unsure about an edit, put it on this page's Talk: page, so somebody else can advise you as to what to do.

Does everyone know about the red exclamation marks in recent changes? It appears not, so let me explain. This is MediaWiki's 'recent changes patrol' feature (this is only for logged in users). On the recent changes page, view and edit by clicking '(diff)' after the name of the edited article. After viewing the diff, click '[Mark as patrolled]', then 'Return to Special:RecentChanges'. Notice that there is no longer a red exclamation mark next to the edit you just 'patrolled'. This tells other recent changes lurkers that somebody has looked that edit and verified, or 'patrolled' it. When a wiki gets really busy, like the Homestar Runner Wiki tends to do on Monday mornings (because that's when homestarrunner.com is usually updated), this greatly helps reduce redundant efforts by the members of the Recent Changes Committee. Wikipedia has this turned off (there are so many edits so quickly there that it would be pretty much impossible to keep up), so if most people aren't going to use it we could do that as well. Those exclamation marks were designed to be annoying!
 * ''Patrol recent changes