Help:Patrolling

Zelda Wiki prides itself in having every single edit marked and patrolled. The Patrollers and Admins/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, dependable editors over time. With such a privilege comes the responsibility and restraint to mark edits as "approved" after fixing, adding, subtracting, or cleaning them up to the best of one's ability. These patrollers are the very editors that ensure the quality standards of this wiki, as described in the Help Guide, are constant, wiki-wide. Without them, the wiki would degrade as the small errors made by all editors propagate 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. Every edit made is patrolled, however, not always by the same patroller. For the edits made in which one patroller is not familiar, they either research the addition to figure out the meaning of the edit, or wait for another, more knowledgable patroller to take over.

Patrollers must not only supervise the submission of typical edits, but also cater to vandals who come to the wiki with malicious intent. These edits are forcibly removed at the earliest chance and the perpetrators are handed over to the admins for chastisement. Zelda Wiki is unique in employing patrollers who do not also have administrator status; thus, patrolling is seen as a "stepping-stone", a test of sorts, to becoming an administrator.

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

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


 * Mark as Patrolled- This option approves any new changes to the article. Before opening an edit view to make any corrections or additions that come to mind, a patroller must scan to see if later changes have been made to the article.
 * 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 not work.
 * If the rollback button is accidentally pressed, it must be quickly undone using the regular undo button; a subsequent statement in the edit summary stating accidence must be made.

It is encouraged that patrollers edit a page after performing a Rollback or Undo function, especially if a portion of the removed earlier change was legitimate. Furthermore, since users may not understand why their edits were reverted, it is also encouraged that a message be left on their talk page as to why the revert was carried out and how they can improve upon their editing style in the future.

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, one must 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. 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 as to new pages. After clicking on the redirect and scrolling down to the bottom of the page, the patroller may notice an evident "mark as patrolled" hyperlink. Before marking as patrolled, one must make sure that the redirect points to the correct location, and if applicable the right article section.

Note: For new redirects to external wikis, one may copy the url to the redirect from the Recent Changes, and then add &redirect=no to the end of the url. After applying the URL to the Internet, the page arrived on will be the redirect, and the "mark as patrolled" hyperlink will be evident. 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
Userpage patrolling is amongst the most relaxed, in respect to supervision and approval rules. Grammar, spelling, and general text content is not of great concern, however, any inappropriate conduct between users, obscenities, or misplaced templates are subject to immediate removal. Authorization from the user is not required in any of the previous conditions.

Talk Pages
As with userpages, the supervision of talk pages is very relaxed, however, comment appropriateness is of the highest priority. Irrelevant of forum-like commentary is dealt with in the form of the template, which flags a comment as "Off Topic". 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.