WikiIndex:RecentChanges patrol
This page is for those that 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 vandalized/spammed page, then click the date and time of the last "good" revision before the vandalism. Edit that, then save the page (No need to actually modify anything) noting something like "rv/vandalism" or whatever your reason for reverting is in the edit summary. 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.
patrol recent changes
Does everyone know about the red exclamation marks in recent changes? It appears not, so let me explain. This is MediaWiki's "RC 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 over, 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 — and they are, so I suggest we do one of the two pronto. —User:Sean Fennel@ 12:16, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)
- Sean, is there any way to "auto-patrol" admins or other trusted people? It's really a pain to have to patrol Mark and Ray's edits, for example. TedErnst | talk 13:57, 7 Mar 2006 (EST)
- You can mark your own edits as patrolled. I think that this undermines the benefit of marking edits as patrolled. Patrolling should mean that someone else sees and reviews the edit. Tristram Shandy 17:17, 7 Mar 2006 (EST)
- I'm pretty sure it's either all or nothing. —User:Sean Fennel@ 03:40, 8 Mar 2006 (EST)
- The usual "rebuttal" to this objection is that most trolls are either too inexperienced to know about this or are too stupid to think of this. Besides, it;s restricted to logged in users. Also, a few recent changes lurkers I know never "patrol" edits for just that very reason. It is, though, helpful in checking content for accuracy, or typos. Typos would be a big thing in projects like the mass creation of pages for every known wiki which Mark's been doing lately. Those edits are rerely more than 2 minutes apart and at one point I saw recent changes completely filled with it. From personal experience I know that you can get going at a pretty good pace on projects like this, so typos (sometimes major) are bound to happen, and with 3 or 4 people going behinf you on recent changes as long as they're not doing redundant work, nobody has to spend much time making sure that the project is truly complete when you're finished. —User:Sean Fennel@ 12:59, 8 Mar 2006 (EST)
- Ah, excellent! This means that it's more important to patrol for the usernames we recognize. If any of Mark's edits have been patrolled, I can be sure someone has checked for typos, whereas, if an IP or someone I don't know has made an edit, the patrolling doesn't necessarily tell me that's a good edit. Since we hope those edits will be few, it's not such a bad thing to have these checked and double-checked, but we really want to avoid having to duplicate the typos-checks on the work of the people that we do trust! I like it! Feel free to re-factor this page to reflect our new understanding of that Recent Changes Patrol is all about. :-) TedErnst | talk 13:15, 8 Mar 2006 (EST)
Forgot to mention before that to patrol the creation of a new page you have to patrol every other edit to the page and then click "Hide patrolled edits" in recent changes. Rather than clicking the diff (as there won't be one, click the name of the page, and look in the bottom right of it for the "Mark this as patrolled" link. Works for redirects, too. —User:Sean Fennel@ 06:44, 7 Apr 2006 (EDT)
members
Put your name here if you plan to participate in the RecentChanges Patrol!
- TedErnst | talk 12:57, 7 Mar 2006 (EST)
- MarkDilley | talk
- —User:Sean Fennel@
- Raymond King | talk 13:56, 12 Mar 2006 (EST)