Help:Patrolled edits

Note: When you edit this page, you agree to release your contribution under the CC0. See Public Domain Help Pages for more info.

Patrolled edits is a feature which allows certain users to mark new pages and items in Special:RecentChanges as "patrolled", meaning that at least a basic review was performed. A good edit might be marked as "patrolled", but a bad edit might also be marked as "patrolled", if it was reverted or its most obvious regressions were fixed. By default this is only available if you have the sysop permission; many wikis grant a 'patrol' permission to groups of users.

This feature is useful when reviewing recent changes for undesirable edits, link spam and vandalism. This allows people (with permission to do so) to coordinate their patrolling activity, such that edits get checked over once, with less wasted effort (different people checking the same edit).

This feature also allows setting trustworthy users' edits to be automatically patrolled, so that the people who review recent changes need not spend time doing unnecessary reviewing.

Marking edits as patrolled

To mark an edit as patrolled

Access Special:RecentChanges
Changes which are not patrolled display with a red exclamation mark (!).
Click the (diff) link next to an edit.
To mark the edit as patrolled, click the Mark as patrolled link.

To mark a new page as patrolled

Access Special:NewPages
New pages which are not patrolled display with a yellow background.
To mark a new page as patrolled, visit it and click the ⧼markaspatrolledlink⧽ link near the bottom of the page.

To mark a new file as patrolled

Access Special:NewFiles
If you want to see only unpatrolled files, check "Hide patrolled uploads"
To mark a new file or new file version as patrolled, visit it and click the ⧼markaspatrolledlink⧽ link near the bottom of the file description.

Caveats

There is currently no method to undo the marking of a page as patrolled.

Hiding patrolled edits from recent changes

Patrolled edits can be hidden from recent changes by adding &hidepatrolled=1 to the URL in the following form:

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&hidepatrolled=1

Note: this works only for users with the patrol or patrolmarks right. This might change after T44246 is solved in future.

Customization

Enabling/disabling

MediaWiki version:

≥ 1.4

Patrolled edits are enabled by default. To disable this, set $wgUseRCPatrol in LocalSettings.php to false.

$wgUseRCPatrol = false;

Permissions

Patrolled edits are enabled for sysops by default. Use the $wgGroupPermissions configuration variable to assign this to new or existing user groups. See Manual:User rights management .

For instance, to create a patrollers group:

$wgGroupPermissions['patrollers']['patrol'] = true;

Automatic patrolling

Edits by users with the "autopatrol" right, assigned only to sysops by default, are automatically marked patrolled.

Marker

The formatting of the unpatrolled edit marker can be altered using CSS. The exclamation mark displayed on the Recent changes log is styled using the span.unpatrolled class.

Log

Patrolling actions are listed in the Patrol log (example).