Help:Patrolling Edits

Zelda Wiki prides itself in having every single edit marked and patrolled. Patrollers, Administrators, and Bureaucrats all share the task of reviewing new changes at Zelda Wiki.

Job Description and the Significance of Patrollers
Patrolling is a privilege earned by esteemed editors who have established themselves on the wiki as reliable, consistent, and dependable editors over time. With such a privilege comes the responsibility of marking edits as "approved" after fixing any errors, ensuring the accuracy of any added information, and ensuring that the edit meets the quality standards to the best of one's ability. Patrollers are responsible for enforcing the quality standards wiki-wide. Without the patrollers, many small errors would go unnoticed and build up over time.

How do patrollers know if an edit is legitimate? Patrollers, as seasoned editors, are highly knowledgeable on the Zelda series, having played or at least researched all games and themes of the series upon receiving the position. If a patroller encounters an edit with which they are not familiar, they must either research the change to the article or wait for another patroller who is more knowledgeable on the subject to patrol the edit.

Patrollers must not only supervise the submission of typical edits, but also cater to vandals who come to the wiki with malicious intent. While patrollers cannot ban said vandals, they can still ensure that the vandalism is hastily removed.

Patrolling Etiquette and Terminology
In the Recent Changes, a red exclamation point beside page names in the list indicates an unpatrolled edit.

Clicking on "(diff)" opens a view highlighting exactly what has been changed between the newest edit and the preceding one. From here, two options are available:


 * Mark as Patrolled- This option approves any new changes to the article. Once a patroller has thoroughly reviewed the edit, he or she must always mark it as patrolled, including vandalism. If the edit is marked as patrolled, it is the responsibility of the patroller who did so to make any appropriate changes to the edit.
 * Rollback- The Rollback function reverts all edits made by a single editor to a version made by another editor. If only one editor has edited on a page, the Rollback function will be unavailable.
 * If the rollback button is accidentally pressed, the rollback can be reverted like any other edit through the "undo" function. It is not appropriate to perform another rollback in this case. It is preferable to leave a message in the edit summary when undoing the rollback, stating the accident.

It is not appropriate to use the rollback function if the editor made at least some productive changes to the page. Instead, the patroller should either edit the page and manually remove unnecessary or questionable information or use the "Undo" function. In cases which call for a rollback, the patroller is encouraged to leave a message on the talk page of the user in question which states the reason for the rollback and what the user could do differently next time. This is common courtesy, as using the rollback feature reverts the user's edits without providing a reason, and the user may want to know why his or her edits were reverted.

Manipulating Your Recent Changes
By selecting the option "Hide patrolled edits", the Recent Changes repopulates to only show unmarked edits. Patrollers working from the bottom of the list may find keeping track of patrolled edits to multiple pages is most efficient as compared to other methods. If set as a semipermanent function in the my preferences tab, this action is useful in long patrolling sessions.

Patrollers may also increase or decrease the range of dates and number of edits shown, using "Show last x changes in last y days" settings under "Recent Changes options". This can be useful in conjunction with other options, as it allows for the viewing of potentially missed unpatrolled edits, and is also helpful when dealing with a large backlog. The defaults for both of these options are toggled under the "Recent changes" section of the my preferences tab.

Also, the "Namespace" dropdown can be used to filter which edits are displayed. Patrollers may find it useful to concentrate on only edits to articles in the (Main) namespace, as article content is usually the most important area when patrolling. It is also possible to exclude a namespace from view; for example, if a batch of edits in the User Talk namespace are obstructing the patrolling process, one may select User Talk from the dropdown and check "Invert selection".

New Pages
To patrol a new page, follow the link to the page in the recent changes, or alternatively through the New Pages special page. The button to patrol the page is at the bottom of the article on the right side. Patrollers are expected to look through the page to make sure it is appropriate for an article, add any tags if necessary, and categorize the page if applicable.

Redirects
A newly created redirect may be patrolled in a similar manner to new pages. Clicking on the redirect will lead to the target page of the redirect. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the "mark as patrolled" button. The patroller must ensure that the redirect points to the appropriate page and/or section (if applicable).

Note: For new redirects to external wikis, copy the url to the redirect from the Recent Changes, and then add &redirect=no to the end of the URL. This will lead to the redirect page without being taken to the target of the redirect. Alternatively, a patroller may instead go to the redirect page to patrol it through the New Pages special page by choosing to show redirects; the resulting list of links will go directly to the redirect pages.

Userpages
Userpages usually do not need to be changed while patrolling. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors should not be changed by the patroller. If the userpage edit contains questionable material such as blatant swears, obscene content, or links to questionable sites, they should be removed immediately and referred to an administrator. The patroller should also edit the talk page of the user and leave a warning stating what content was removed, why it was removed, and the consequences which the user may face is the behavior is repeated. In these cases, the patroller does not need authorization from the user to edit the page.

Talk Pages
Like user pages, talk page edits do not need to be corrected for spelling, grammar, etc. Instead, it is the responsibility of the patroller to ensure that the discussions are on topic and appropriate. Talk pages are used to discuss improvements to an article and not to discuss the subject. Irrelevant or forum-like comments are off topic, and when encountered should be flagged with the OT template, which flags a comment as "Off Topic" and advises the user to visit a forum to discuss the subject. Inappropriate conduct such as "edit warring" or "rollback tennis" may be subject to consequences given the severity of the matter, at the discretion of the administrators.