Help:Staff guidebook

Shortcut: P:STAFFGUIDE

The following is a list of information and tips about how staff members can best use the tools at their disposal to help the wiki.

Patrolling and cleaning up

Edit patrolling is a feature that wiki staff have access to. Essentially, it's a way of saying that you've checked the edit out, so other staff members don't need to. Most commonly this happens due to a staff member browsing the recent changes and seeing what's new by clicking the "diff" buttons.

Pikipedia:Claims explains the key notes for accepting (or not accepting) an edit that's making a claim. For edits that aren't claims, you should make changes to the article to correct any policy, guideline, or style mishaps. You could also do stuff like adding {{clean}}.

If you're not sure about an edit, discuss it with other staff or leave it unpatrolled, so it can be looked at by somebody that's more certain. It's preferable to leave an edit unpatrolled than patrolling it when it has a problem. If that happens, the edit will be left on the wiki for years, causing problems throughout.

Tricky cases

Some edits look harmless on the surface, but if you try your hardest, you can imagine some problems. This doesn't necessarily mean the edit is bad and needs to be undone, but it does mean that it should be improved. Don't mark it as patrolled until it is improved.

• A user changes the name of a section of an article to include the game's name, and they do so without italicizing the name.

  What you should do seems clear: italicize the game name. But consider this: do other articles have links to this section of the page? If so, then the addition of the game name will have broken all of the links... Should you correct the links, or bring the section name to how it was before?

• A user removes a sentence that explained a specific characteristic about a character. That characteristic was debatable canon, and the user did not agree it should be mentioned alongside canon information.

  No one fan is the authority on what is canon and what isn't, so we should follow the rules the wiki has for this. In addition, by removing the information, it just means another user in the future will feel the need to mention it again. Ideally, you should adjust the page so that information is not lost, and is still compliant to our policies and guidelines.

• A user removes a {{todo}} that called editors to check if something is true. There is no edit summary.

  Is this user implying that they have checked that it's true, so the template is no longer necessary? Maybe, but they never explained in the edit summary. And where's the proof? In these cases, you should probably double-check yourself too, or ask the user to elaborate in their talk page.

Undoing

To undo what a user did, you have a few possibilities:

1. Pressing the rollback button in a diff's page.

   The [rollback 1 edit] (or a higher number) button is exclusive to staff, and it instantly patrols and reverts the user's latest edits on that article, by creating a new edit that brings the article back to how it was before. This does not let you adjust the article, write an edit summary, or control which edits to undo, so it should only be used in cases where it's an obvious vandal or spam.

2. Pressing the undo button in a diff's page.

   The (undo) button puts you in the editing form, with the page in the same state as it was before that user's edit (or edits). Here, you can make further adjustments if necessary, as well as to write an edit summary for your undo. You should always explain why you are undoing the edit. Remember to also patrol the undone edit(s).

3. Editing from an older revision.

   When you're in a diff's page or a revision's page, you can hit (edit) or the standard Edit button to edit the article from that version of the page. A warning at the top will let you know you're working with an outdated version. This is useful when you want to undo multiple edits and also do some tweaks all together, and also works well when you can't undo directly because of edit conflicts, though you should be careful that you're not getting rid of some good edits that came later in the timeline. Again, you should always explain why you are undoing the edit, and remember to patrol the edit(s).

4. Editing the text by hand.

   If the edit is too involved, it may not be possible to undo it with either of the previous two methods. In this case you will have to edit the article by hand and undo things manually by writing the old text again. As usual, you should always explain why you are undoing the edit and patrol the edit(s).

Gadgets

Pikipedia has a selection of gadgets designed to make the task of patrolling easier. They, alongside other gadgets, can be found in your user preference page's gadgets tab.

Patrol entire page

If a page has no problems, it makes sense for all its edits to be patrolled. Instead of doing this manually one-by-one, you can use this gadget. It creates a "Patrol entire page" button on the toolbar to the left that immediately patrols all edits of the page at once.

Notes:

• Because of the way patrolling works internally in MediaWiki, this comes with limitations: if the recent changes has many edits, the script will be unable to fetch some of the unpatrolled edits belonging to the page, and will only patrol a few, or even none at all. So it's best used when the edits you are trying to patrol happened very recently, or when the wiki is not very active.
• For other uses the next gadget might work better.

Patrol from here

Like the previous gadget, this allows you to patrol many edits of a page in one go. When you're viewing a page's diff, you'll see a "Patrol from here" button on the toolbar to the left. What the script then does is click the patrol button visible on the diff's page for you, and when the edit is patrolled, click the next edit button. It repeats all the way until it reaches the latest revision, effectively patrolling all edits from that point on.

Notes:

• Due to the way this gadget approaches patrolling, it will catch any unpatrolled edit that the previous gadget won't, assuming your starting point didn't have unpatrolled edits before.
• It will also act much slower than the previous gadget. Not just because of how it works, but due to the following two points instead.
• When the gadget enters the next diff's page, it starts a 3 second countdown before it does its thing, so that you have the opportunity to cancel.
• It's possible that your browser might delay the page changing if the tab in which this is happening is not visible, making the process even slower, so if your browser has this behavior and you're in a hurry, you can open a new browser window with just one tab on that page, and then run the gadget; this seems to be enough to fool the browser into doing it in full-speed.
• The gadget only works on one page at a time, so manage your patrolling appropriately.
• If you're seeing a diff of multiple edits, note that the gadget will start on the last edit of the bunch, not the first.

Recent changes popular pages

Creates a button on the recent changes, below all the filters, that displays what the most popular pages are in the list right in front of you. This is a good way of finding pages that have been getting a lot of attention lately, whose edits you can observe in bulk, and likewise, patrol in bulk. It's also useful just to catch pages with a lot of bustle that may require review. To make the best use out of it, try filtering your recent changes to only showing unpatrolled edits, or to show 1000 edits.

Patrol link consistent placement

Normally, in a diff page, the previous edit, next edit, and patrol buttons go below the edit's metadata, meaning that on-screen, their positions can vary depending on the edit summary, whether the edit is patrolled, and more. That makes it a bit annoying to get in the zone of analyzing a diff, patrolling it, moving to the next one, repeat, since your muscle memory will make you click the wrong places when trying to hit those buttons. This gadget puts them in a consistent spot every single time: above the edit metadata, and in the cases of an unpatrolled edit, the next edit button always appears on the right half of that space, and the patrol button always on the left. For file pages, this places the patrol link above the image.

Tips

• If a user's made many edits in a row, and you want to see all of them as one diff, or even undo all of them at once, you can go to the page's history, scroll to the edit before the first, and click the "cur" button. Alternatively, use the radio buttons and click "Compare selected revisions".
• Coordinate with other staff members. Maybe you like to keep a lookout on articles of a certain type that another staff member doesn't like.
• Install a spellchecker for your browser. Not only will this help you catch the occasional mistake you might make while typing, but it's also good for when you're just reading a page's source and spot some red underline that escaped unnoticed all this time.
• Learn MediaWiki and your browser's shortcuts. Something like opening many edits to patrol or fix them all gets much much faster if you do it like this instead of left-clicking everywhere: middle-click the edit links to open the diffs in new tabs, Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, Ctrl+W to close the tab when you're done with it, Alt+Shift+E to make a change, Alt+Shift+S to save it. You mostly kept your left hand on the keyboard and your right hand on the mouse, and that was just one example!
• Deleting a page removes all of its edits from the recent changes, and as such, means they are not a part of the list of unpatrolled changes. So you don't need to patrol all edits to a page before deleting it.

See also

• Pikipedia:Staff