UESPWiki:Patrollers

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UESPWiki: Policies and Guidelines

Patrollers are a subset of editors who regularly monitor the Recent Changes page to ensure that new edits meet the site's style guidelines. To help them work together on this task, patrollers are provided with a couple of special tools.

Although patrollers may be the editors who most actively monitor recent changes, all members of the community are welcome to participate. All editors, including first-time visitors to the site, are invited to help maintain the wiki's quality standards. If you notice a typo or broken link, please help us by editing the page and fixing it. If you notice Vandalism, please undo the edit and add a warning to the editor's talk page, if appropriate. The main tasks done by patrollers are available to all UESP editors; patrollers just have access to a couple of shortcuts.

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[edit] Patroller Tools

The most integral part of patrolling are red exclamation points that are shown on the Recent Changes page and the patroller's watchlist, indicating that the associated edit has not yet been approved. These red exclamation points are only visible to patrollers, and their presence (or absence) has no general effect upon the page. If any patroller marks an edit as "patrolled", the exclamation point disappears for all patrollers.

In the current version of the the wiki software, all patrollers' edits are always marked as patrolled. All other new edits are automatically given a red exclamation point. There are only a very limited number of ways to pull up the option to mark the edit as patrolled:

  • From the Recent Changes page, or the patroller's Watchlist page, click the "(diff)" link next to an edit. On the page that comes up there will be a link "[Mark as patrolled]".
  • For new pages, there is no "(diff)" link; instead, just click on the page name. In this case, "[Mark as patrolled]" shows up in the bottom right corner of the page.
  • Use the Patrol special page, described below.

When a series of edits are made to a page, each one must be marked separately; simply marking the last edit will not clear all the previous edits. Also, editing the page yourself does not clear any previous edits.

The one special tool made available to patrollers is the Patrol special page, described at Mediawiki. This is a new tool, so we will all have to learn how to use it. Based on the description, it should:

  • When a patroller pulls up this page it will select an edit that needs to be reviewed. Only one patroller will be shown a given edit at a time, which will limit the possibility that two patrollers will try to fix the same page at the same time.
  • In the case of edits that should be undone, it provides a simple one-step interface to reverse the edit and mark it as patrolled. The reason for the reversal, as shown in the edit summary, can be selected from a list of standard messages or a custom message can be entered.

[edit] Criteria for "Patrolled" Edits

See new UESPWiki:Patrollers/Patrolling Guidelines page, eventually intended to replace this section once approved by other Patrollers. Reasons explained on Talk page for new page.


The most important part of the criteria used to mark an edit as "patrolled" is that all patrollers are using the same criteria. It is important to have uniform standards, so patrollers can be confident that they do not need to double-check an edit cleared by another patroller.

In general, an edit needs to be factually sound and meet the site's style guidelines to be marked as patrolled. If an edit does not meet these specifications, the patroller needs to take action to correct these infractions. This may include fixing incorrect grammar, correcting wrong facts, and removing vandalism from the page; once the edit has been fixed it can then be marked as patrolled. If a patroller does not know whether an edit is factually sound, the edit should be left unpatrolled, allowing other patrollers who are more knowledgeable about the topic to check the edit for accuracy. The following Question and Answer section provides more specific examples.

Question: I just made corrections to a page, do I mark the original edit as patrolled?

  • Yes, if all necessary corrections have been made for that edit, you should mark it as patrolled. This lets all the other patrollers know that the edit no longer needs to be rechecked, as the required actions were taken.

Question: A single editor made several edits in a row, should I mark them all as patrolled, or is only marking the last one fine?

  • Each individual edit needs to be separately patrolled; there is no mechanism for automatically marking a whole sequence of edits as patrolled. What is most important in evaluating the edits is the final version of the page.
    • If the net effect of a sequence of edits is acceptable, the entire sequence can be marked as patrolled. For example, if an editor added a sentence, then changed his/her mind and deleted it, the net effect is that the article was not changed, and both edits can immediately be marked as patrolled.
    • If a second edit fixes the only problem with the first edit, both edits should be marked as patrolled.
    • If a complex set of changes was made to the page, you may need to individually evaluate each edit. If you can verify some of the edits (e.g., grammar corrections), you can mark those individual edits as patrolled, while skipping other edits (an addition of an obscure fact) that may be outside of your expertise. Patrolling five of the six edits, for example, allows subsequent patrollers to quickly identify the edit that requires fact-checking.

Question: A user asked a question on a talk page. I don't know the answer but there's nothing wrong with the post. Should I mark it as patrolled?

  • If the question is of limited scope and interest, leave it unpatrolled and hopefully another patroller will spot the question and be able to answer it.
  • If the question is one that would benefit the site by being answered, add the {{Good Question|date}} template to flag the question for the wider site readership.

Question: A user answered a question on a talk page. Should I mark it as patrolled?

  • Comments (other than questions) made on talk pages generally do not need much cleanup. In particular, most style guidelines do not apply to edits on talk pages (see Talk Namespaces). If the comment was not signed, add the {{unsigned|username}} template after the post; sometimes formatting needs to be fixed. Otherwise, if there is no followup action required by the comment (e.g., if the comment simply answers a previous question or makes a general observation), then the edit can be marked as patrolled.

Question: A user edited their own user page. Why does the edit have to be patrolled? Aren't all edits made to user pages acceptable?

  • Generally edits made by a user to their own user page can immediately be marked as patrolled. However, patrolling is still necessary to check for problems such as clearly inappropriate language or adding inappropriate userboxes (e.g., adding mentor, patroller, or admin userboxes). If there is a problem, a request should be made on the user's talk page asking the user to modify their page. If the user does not fix the problem within a week, then the user page can be edited to fix the problem.

Question: I've found an edit that's really long. It contains what appears to be good information, but the style in it is lacking. I currently lack the will/time to deal with it, what should I do?

  • If it's a relatively new edit (less than a day old), it may be best to skip that edit for the moment in case another patroller is able to deal with it
  • If the edit is more than a couple of days old and is still unpatrolled, it may be necessary to tag the page as one that needs more work. For example, add a {{cleanup}} tag to the article, and then mark the edit as patrolled. This allows other patrollers to know that the page does not contain any vandalism, but the cleanup tag allows it to be easily identified as a page that needs attention.

Question: I'm not sure that this edit is factually correct, but there's no easy way to find out if it is correct.

  • If it's a relatively new edit (less than a day old), do not mark the edit as patrolled unless you know the facts are correct. This allows other patrollers, who may know the subject better than you, to review the edit and make the correct call.
  • If the edit is more than a couple of days old and is still unpatrolled, then it is possible that none of the patrollers can verify the information. At this point, somebody needs to make a judgment call about the information. If you are a new patroller and not comfortable with the options, it is probably best to leave this decision up to a more experienced patroller.
    • If the edit appears correct but is on a topic about which none of the patrollers are knowledgeable (e.g., one of the older Elder Scrolls games), the edit can be marked as patrolled. In particular, edits made by regular contributors can be trusted to be relatively accurate.
    • If the information seems highly unlikely, move the information to the talk page with an explanation of what makes you doubt the information's accuracy or appropriateness for UESP.
    • If the information is unclear or somewhat dubious, clean up the edit as much as possible, and add a {{Verification needed}} (or {{VN}} or {{huh}}) tag to the edit.

Question: What happens to edits that are left unpatrolled?

  • By clicking on "Hide patrolled edits" in Recent Changes it is possible to see those edits that have not yet been patrolled. Typically looking at the last 500 edits (e.g., [1]) will show you all of the unpatrolled edits in the system. The Recent changes log only keeps track of one week's worth of edits.
    • Some edits may never get patrolled, even after a week has passed. However, the goal is to minimize the number of such edits and hopefully limit the unpatrolled edits to pages with known quality problems (e.g., pages with the Template:Quality tag) and hard-to-answer questions that don't warrant a Good Question tag.
    • Patrollers should try to occasionally look over the unpatrolled edits that are more than a day old and see whether they can can help deal with any of those edits (see specific suggestions provided in answers to the previous questions). The older edits are the more difficult ones, but somebody eventually has to deal with them.

[edit] Becoming a Patroller

Nominations for patrollers are on the Nominations Subpage. There is nothing wrong with self nominations.

[edit] Nomination Guidelines

There are no truly hard and fast guidelines to nominating a patroller, but the community does look for certain things when deciding whether or not to accept the candidate. Here's a list of things that make up an unofficial criteria for patrollers.

  1. Editing Experience- As a patroller, you will be dealing with many different aspects of wiki markup. You need to know how to deal with headers, templates, and tables. A minimum of 100 edits will allow us to judge such things. Edits to your own User page, or User Talk page should not be counted as part of the 100.
  2. Time on the Site- The community needs to know that you'll be around for a while after becoming a patroller, so it is important for a candidate to have a period (about a week) of continuous activity before being nominated, or a long period (a year or more) of intermittent activity.
  3. Spelling and Grammar- As a patroller, you will be checking other people's edits for spelling and grammar mistakes, therefore you need to show this trait in your own edits. You need to adhere to the UESP Spelling page in order to properly patrol edits.
  4. Style- Being a patroller means that you must be able to follow the Style Guide. This means no first person within articles as well as a number of other things. Additions to the UESPwiki should be as readable as possible, and thus patrollers sometimes need to rephrase poorly written edits.
  5. Watch Recent Changes- As a patroller, you will have to watch the Recent Changes page. Doing so before becoming a patroller is advisable to get a feel for the job. Even if you are not a patroller, you can select the "Hide patrolled edits" options on Recent changes, allowing you to see which edits are still on the patrollers' "todo" list.
  6. No Recent Nomination- If a user has been nominated with their consent in the past three months, and that nomination was either rejected or withdrawn, they are not eligible to be nominated again.

[edit] Current Patrollers

All administrators automatically have patroller privileges. In addition, the following editors are patrollers:

[edit] Userbox

After being successfully nominated to become a Patroller, you can place the Patroller userbox on your user page:

Image:PatrollerIcon.jpg This user is a Recent Changes Patroller.

[edit] See Also

Retrieved from "http://www.uesp.net/wiki/UESPWiki:Patrollers"
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