What the Recent changes patrol does:
- Highest priority: new and anonymous user edits. If you want to take on a more manageable role, you could specialize in one of these:
- anon editors' contributions (or click "Hide logged-in users" on RecentChanges).
- New users: Newbies
- New pages: Special:NewPages. Select a namespace to focus on - Main is most important. New user pages are often posted by spammers, but this should be picked up by the other patrols, above. (If you want a simpler view, see Special:NewestPages.)
For a more complete patrol, monitor the Recentchanges page.
- If you are an admin, you will see a link that lets you "mark article as patrolled." This helps admins to cooperate in making sure that all new pages and new edits are checked, polished, linked, etc.
MediaWiki lets you filter the RecentChanges feed:
- Tweak the settings at the top of Special:Recentchanges. If you want to focus on a particular area (e.g. anon editors, contributions by new user accounts, [article talk pages]...) then you can mention that if you "sign up" below.
- To track a subject area, you can use the "Related changes" link, found in the lowest section of the left sidebar. Go to a category you want to monitor and click "Related changes" and it will show all recent changes made to pages in the category. However, it's not a complete solution - it will not show when pages are added to or removed from the category. (It also doesn't show you relevant pages which are not yet in the category - see Appropedia:Categorization project for work on this.)
Other logs are also worth monitoring, e.g. Special:NewFiles shows a gallery of new files - monitor it for possible spam, copyright violations and missing licensing or missing fair-use justification.
For more suggestions, see Help:Monitoring changes and the Recent changes patrol on Wikipedia.
Patrol members[edit | edit source]
Lots of people keep an eye on Special:RecentChanges - if you do, you might want to add your name here. You can use an asterisk and three tildes, ~~~.
Interwiki links[edit | edit source]
- Meta:Help:Recent changes [1] - helpful hints and tools.