Recent pages patrol





Recent changes patrol is a feature that can help to decrease redundancy with many people checking the same edit.

Users that have been granted patrolling rights may take part in the recent changes patrol. The patrol is a way to show that each edit has been checked to make sure it conforms to the policies of this wiki. It also prevents a duplication of effort by clearly indicating which edits have and have not been checked.

Edits that have not been checked will be preceded by a red exclamation mark on the the Recent changes page. Approval of an edit is granted by clicking on "[Mark as patrolled]" or "[Mark this page as patrolled]". The difference between the two function is explained below.

On the Recent changes page, there is an option to hide the patrolled edits so that only the edits that have not yet been checked will be displayed. It is located at in the "Recent changes options" box at the top of the page.

Edits made by users with patrol rights are automatically marked as patrolled.

The feature can be enabled or disabled on any wiki on request, either completely (ask for the setting $wgUseRCPatrol) or enabled for admins only (ask for the setting $wgOnlySysopsCanPatrol). This feature is currently disabled by default. It is always possible for admins to patrol page creation through Special:NewPages, though.

Web browser differences
When a page is marked as patrolled, a status message is displayed with an option to return to the Recent Changes page. At the moment, it is not possible to mark a range of edits as approved. Each one must be checked separately.

If several edits in a row need to be checked, it is helpful to use a web browser with tabbed browsing support, such as Opera, Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 and higher. This allows the status message to be sent to a separate tab, and continuing forward or back through the differences of a page.

Similarly, if the web browser has the option to create background tabs, each revision can be approved with the status message going into a background tab that can be closed after all edits have been checked.

Opening a link in a background tab:


 * Firefox: Hold down the CTRL key and click on the link.
 * Opera: Right-click on the link and select "Open in background tab".

Filtering out patrolled edits
When looking at the Recent changes list, edits that have not yet been checked are shown with an exclamation mark next to the timestamp. It may be helpful to filter out the edits that have been patrolled. You can do so by going to the "Recent changes options" near the top of the page and clicking on "Hide patrolled edits".

Patrolling a single edit
From the Recent Changes page, click on the "diff" link to see the comparison of the page before and after the edit. If the edit is acceptable, click on "[Mark as patrolled]". If it is not acceptable, leave it as unpatrolled, then fix the edit.

Patrolling a series of edits
The "[Mark as patrolled]" command only appears when displaying the difference between two pages. When more than one edit needs be checked, make a note of the timestamp of the first edit, then click on the "hist" link to display the history of the page.

After the Revision history is displayed, click on the timestamp immediately prior to the edit to be checked. Next, click on the "(diff)" link at the top of the page to the right of "Newer revision →". The differences will then be displayed with the "[Mark as patrolled]" command.

As noted under "Web browser differences", it is helpful to divert the status message into a separate tab when clicking on "[Mark as patrolled]". This will allow you to click on "Newer edit →" to review the rest of the edits.

Patrolling a new page
For newly-created pages that have not had any further edits, click on the page name. The page can be approved by clicking on "[Mark this page as patrolled]" in the lower-right corner. If the page is not acceptable, either fix the problem or edit it to add     to signal to an adminstrator that the page needs to be deleted.


 * Note: When viewing newly-created pages on the New Pages page, unpatrolled pages are highlighted in yellow.

For newly-created pages with later edits, you will first need to click on the time stamp of when the page was created. The "[Mark this page as patrolled]" is displayed, along with "Newer revision → (diff)" at the top. Edits can then be checked the same as described in the "Patrolling a series of edits" section above.

Blogs
Blog posts can be marked as patrolled using the same procedure as a newly-created page. At this time, comments in a blog cannot be marked as patrolled. Each comment must be individually checked.

For comments that are approved, no action needs to be taken. The comment will continue to show as unpatrolled in the Recent changes list, however.

Comments that do not meet the wiki's standards will need to be edited or deleted. When editing a comment, keep in mind that you are altering what that person said. Use care to remove only the part that does not meet standards. If the entire comment needs to be deleted, add the     template at the top of the comment to alert an administrator.

Logs and help
The Patrol log will display all pages that have been patrolled. By default, the Patrol log is not included when viewing all public logs.