Help:Patrol

Inkipedia uses the MediaWiki patrolling feature to ensure that every single edit is reviewed for quality and policy adherence. Every staff member has access to the patrolling function, all sharing the responsibility of reviewing edits.

Basic patrolling
A red exclamation point will show next to unpatrolled edits on the recent changes page.

Patrolling recent changes

 * 1) Go to Special:RecentChanges and select Hide patrolled edits.
 * 2) * You can also increase the number of edits and days displayed to see the oldest unreviewed edits.
 * 3) Open a diff and review it.
 * 4) Select [Mark as reviewed].
 * 5) * When patrolling new pages, there will be no diff. Open the page and select [Mark this page as reviewed], located at the bottom-right of the page.
 * 6) * When patrolling a page with multiple edits, view the most recent diff and select ← Older edit to go to the previous diff, repeating until all recent changes to the page have been reviewed and marked as patrolled.

Patrolling with the PatrolTool
This is the quickest way to patrol edits.


 * 1) Go to PatrolTool.
 * 2) Select the namespaces you want to review. (Main) is where all the articles are.
 * 3) Press Continue. It will display the number of unpatrolled changes in the queue. Press Continue again.
 * 4) Review the diff.
 * 5) Select Mark as patrolled and continue to patrol the change and load the next one, or Ignore and continue to leave the change unpatrolled.
 * 6) * Tip: The Enter key can be used as a keyboard shortcut for whatever button was previously clicked.
 * So for example, if you press Mark as patrolled and continue, and don't press any other on-screen button, you can press the Enter key to rapidly patrol edits.

Patrolling file uploads

 * 1) Go to Special:NewFiles and select Hide patrolled uploads.
 * 2) Open a file and review it.
 * 3) Select [Mark this file version as reviewed], located under the licensing info.

What to do after hitting the [mark as reviewed] button
If you did not see any problems with the edit, no further action is necessary.

If the edit was made in good faith but has a problem due to the editor's lack of experience or familiarity with Inkipedia policy, undo or improve upon the edit, and leave an edit summary or talk page message that lets the user know what they could have done better.

If the edit was blatant vandalism, undo it. If there are multiple bad edits by the same user on the same page, use rollback, or if necessary, manually undo changes (as the undo button will not work) by editing the negative changes or by viewing the last good revision and pressing save to revert to that revision. Note that rollback should not be used if you want to provide an edit summary, because rollback does not allow you to write one. When vandalism is blatant, there is no need to provide an edit summary describing why you are reverting it. If a new page was created, consider having it deleted.

Tips

 * When you believe a new user has made an editing mistake, it's best to notify them by talk page instead of just leaving an edit summary. This is because new users are unlikely to monitor edit summaries.
 * Patrolling does not mean perfecting. There are edits that would take a long time for you to fix, or would be better fixed by the user who made the edit in the first place. Your time is valuable and could be better spent by playing Splatoon or patrolling other Inkipedia edits. Leave a message on the user's talk page letting them know of how to improve their edit, or leave a notice template on the article to let others know that it needs improvement.
 * Know your shortcuts. On most browsers, holding down Ctrl (Command on Mac) and clicking a link will open it in a new tab. Use this to open diffs while keeping your recent changes tab open. You can even open several edits at once. Cycle through the tabs with a "next tab" shortcut (usually Ctrl+Tab or Command+Tab). Close tabs with the "close tab" shortcut (usually Ctrl+W or Command+W).

Patrolling deleted edits
Sometimes, when a page / file is deleted or a file revision is replaced before it was patrolled, it is impossible using the normal procedure above to view the edit (and reach the "mark as patrolled" link mentioned). This leaves the patrol log dirty and should be fixed. The easiest method to patrol these "impossible to patrol" edits is to reach the edit in PatrolTool and mark it as patrolled. Another method would be locating the rcid (Recent Changes ID) as described below.

To mark these edits as patrolled by locating rcid:
 * 1) First, get the rcid of the unpatrolled edit, using the query API:
 * Use
 * equivalent of the Special:RecentChanges page.
 * which fields to fetch. The rcid is what we need, the others are useful for identifying the edit.
 * the filter for the query. This will fetch all edits currently marked as unpatrolled (it is best to patrol as many edits as possible using the normal method first).
 * sets the maximum number of results that can be displayed.
 * 1) Then, use the patrol API to mark the edit as patrolled
 * Use  (Replace 12345 with each rcid)
 * This will take you to a special page which will show the name of the edited page or file, and ask you to confirm marking as patrolled. This does not show the diff or any other information, so it should be avoided unless necessary.

Automated patrolling
It is possible to automate the process of patrolling. It is particularly useful to automate the clearing of the oldest edits from an excessively long patrol queue, as very old edits have presumably been seen by the general public, and therefore such edits do not need to be individually reviewed by a human.

An example of a patrol automation tool is the Pywikibot patrol.py script.