Help:Patrolled edit

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

Patrolling edits is restricted to users with the patrol right: by default, only administrators; other groups such as "Reviewer" or "Patroller" exist on some wikis. Edits by users with the autopatrol right are automatically marked as patrolled when the edit is saved.

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

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

While a patrolled one would be like this:

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

When looking at the difference view of an unpatrolled edit (by clicking 'diff' on Special:RecentChanges), patrollers see the link like the following above the difference view: "[Mark this page as patrolled]".

A set of consecutive edits by a same user can also be patrolled all at once by a rollback. This patrolling is not logged and may happen even if no new revision is saved.

Patrolled pages

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.

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:

1. you see that it is a good page
2. or 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.

Patrolled Files

Files can also be patrolled from their description page, including new file versions. New files can be viewed at Special:NewFiles where there is an option to show only unpatrolled files.

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).

Classes

There are two class attributes related to patrolled edits:

1. 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.
2. 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}

See also

• FlaggedRevs – Flagged Revisions (also known as stable versions)
• Help:Recent changes
• mw:Help:Patrolled edits

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