User:Steve M/Draft sandbox

You want to be a recent changes patroller, looking for vandalism to revert. What to do? How to revert vandalism efficiently? This is a manual on how to be a good recent changes patroller.

First
What do you want to do? The most effective one is reverting blatant vandalism and spam. That is the most effective, as there are hundreds of vandalous edits every day, most of which are reverted and warned by Cluebot NG, but some pass through, and some people ignore the warning and continue, or outright revert Cluebot. Materialscientist and Fuzheado are some of the most active recent changes patrollers, and you should take a look at their contribs to get a feel on the trend towards what vandal edits look like. I am also a very active recent changes patroller, so feel free to check my contribs.

Next, you use a tool to expedite the process greatly. Huggle is possible, and is used by most major patrollers, but I'm not a fan of it and it requires rollback privileges, something not everyone has. Twinkle is a good, reliable tool, as it had three buttons, and even misguided good-faith edits can be reverted with a good-faith button. It also has many other features for other types of vandalism that is in the documentation. Redwarn also exists, but it is in beta, and is therefore not reliable.

Identifying edits that need to be checked
There are hundreds of edits every second in the recent changes. No human can possible check all the edits as they are made. For that reason, filtering must be done to identify suspicious edits. One way it to draw out the bad apples by filtering. One such filter is here.


 * 1) Check the username (If it is an account). Does the username contain obscenities or attacks (in which case you can automatically report the account to Usernames for administrator attention with Twinkle), the numbers "69" or "420", is the name of a company or known sockpuppeteer and/or is something childish/immature that draws attention?
 * 2) Is the edit summary generic like "Fixed typo", nonsense like "asdfas", "added content", offensive or attack like "User:Example is a jerk", "**** you", or complains about censorship and/or is something that draws attention?
 * 3) Do you remember warning the user for vandalism before?