Wikipedia talk:Recent changes patrol/Archives/2012/January

Collaboration
Is there a tool, or could one be created, to allow collaborative RCP? What I had in mind, is a way of marking the RSS feed to cross out recent edits that had been verified as constructive (in green ) or as vandalism (in red ), or as good faith (in yellow ), in a wiki so that others could see if someone had already looked at the recent change and verified that it was ok or not. Even better, add that as an attribute to the edit. There are a ballpark of one or two thousand people searching for something on Wikipedia every second, but only about half a dozen edits per second, which works out to less than five hundred per minute, more than any one person can monitor, and with every RCP'er randomly looking at edits, I am finding that as much as 20% of vandalism is falling through the cracks, lurking to be discovered as much as a few months later. We have all heard of stories of that. This would create a page that would buffer the last 500 edits until someone marked it and a minute after being marked it would disappear from the buffer. Give users the option of viewing the most recent/or oldest 50/100/250/500 edits in the buffer. 199.125.109.105 (talk) 18:42, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Good idea. You're right about the 20% thing, I've thought about it myself, and i even did some research. I chose ten vandalized pages, waited ten ,minutes for each one, and checked if they had been reverted. Turns out that, after 10 mins, only seven out of ten were reverted. That comes out to 30% (Of course, to get a more accurate figure, I'd have to check at least 100 edits). Maybe something like the patrolling feature on newpages. Or just make some non-automated tags (Ones which a RC patroller can set) and a script to go with it. Of course, either one will require some code change, so we'll need a 'crat to do it. Manish EarthTalk •  Stalk
 * One more thing. There are many pages prone to vandalism, especially pages which talk about some debated subject, or pages prone to racist remarks. These pages should have their own RC (Not semiprotected pages ow which there are relatively few, but any page which seems even remotely prone to vandalism) Manish EarthTalk •  Stalk 14:01, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Since RC patrolling is about quality control, rather than just vandalism, I would like to see the number of patrollers increase to a level that would permit examination of as many changes as possible, very soon after they are made. If that ever happens, the problem of patrollers stepping on each other will only increase. It is not enough that edits be graded after they are patrolled; there needs to be a scheme to route changes to individual reviewers, so that if you are looking at an edit, it will not be queued to me. At least one tool, STiki, does this, but there are many tools, so some sort of coordination between tools would be necessary. The routing scheme should look at categories, to route edits to people who are best suited to judge and/or fix them. Peter Chastain (talk) 03:15, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Coordination of RC patrol
It seems to me that I check a lot of recent changes that other editors have already checked or are currently checking. If other editors have also noticed this then it's likely that there's a lot of resources being tied up checking already checked pages (duplication) rather than checking pages that haven't already been checked. It would be useful if there was an automatically and continually updated real time list of (trusted or frequent) RC patrollers that are currently checking pages (currently "logged in" to RC Patrol, if you like) along with a real time list of recent changes they have assigned to themselves that other RC patrollers can then ignore - basically chunks of Special:RecentChanges allocated to editors currently on RC patrol to avoid duplication. Does anyone know of any efforts to coordinate RC patrolling along these (or similar) lines? If there aren't, does anyone think it would be a good idea to do so? Ha! (talk) 12:13, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Others have made the same observation, above - see the sections and .  The answer is yes, Wikipedia has a process for doing this - it's called "patrolled edits", and it's described at Help:Patrolled edit.  My understanding is that this was tried in January 2005 (see Wikipedia talk:Checked edits brainstorming) and, due to lack of participation, was declared unsuccessful.  It's almost four years later, and there are lots of automated tools, so perhaps things have changed enough to try again. (One possible comparison is to new pages, which had marked patrolling enable in November 2007.  I don't know how well that is going - you could check at New pages patrol.  ) -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 15:04, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * (Additional comment): if there is interest in going forward with this, one thing that could help a lot would be to give "autopatrol" rights to editors who are in the "rollback" group - see User access levels. My guess is that could reduce the workload of marking edits as patrolled by at least 10 percent, with only a tiny, tiny risk of an editor with such privileges actually abusing it.  (I think such a tradeoff would be well worth it; until/unless there are enough volunteers so that 100% of all edits are patrolled, the best use of editors' time is to focus on the edits that are the most likely to be problematical.)  -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 15:12, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Autopatrolled applies only to page creation. It is not a right (it doesn't give an editor any new powers), but a mechanism to reduce the workload of new-page patrollers by labeling articles created by experienced article creators as already patrolled. As such, it is a form of whitelisting, which is already used by many of the anti-vandalism tools. However, as I have argued supra, the goal of change patrol is quality control. Certainly, priority should be given to changes made by editors who have not yet established a good reputation for themselves, but I would argue that all changes should be looked at, if possible. Think of it as being like the peer review in scientific journals. We all get things wrong, and RCP is a way to get an extra pair of eyes on our work. Peter Chastain (talk) 03:49, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

To let it be or not to let it be?
While patrolling RC, I realized that there are many edits, which could be marked as sneaky vandalism. For example, changing 2009 to 2008 etc. The problem is, you can't tell if the user is fixing a mistake or making one. I've noticed that the edit is never reverted, editors let it be. Shouldn't there be a group of patrollers working out if such edits are legit? Manish EarthTalk • Stalk 13:34, 15 August 2009 (UTC)


 * You have made a compelling argument for rigorous footnoting. The editor who wrote 2009 got it from somewhere and should cite that source, so that subsequent editors and patrollers can fact-check. Citation is time-consuming, but it saves tons of time in the long run. I would say that all patrollers should try to work out whether small edits are legit. I try to do so, when it is possible. When all else fails, I look at the editor's history and talk page for warnings and reversions. If I still have doubts, I place a  tag on the changed information. Even if nobody ever finds a reference, the tag alerts readers to the possibility that the number might not be correct. Peter Chastain (talk) 04:39, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Any way to get this to all the patrollers (for consensus)? Looks like this page isn't watched. 2009 is a looong time for anyone to take notice. =D Manish Earth Talk • Stalk 01:14, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Six WP users (not counting a bot) edited this page last year. People tend not to read talk page, looking for new stuff in the middle, so I would suggest starting a new section at the bottom, proposing changes to the project page, which will be read by more RCPers than a talk page is. I have a few ideas and will probably add my 2 cents, within a few days. Thanks, Peter Chastain (talk) 05:03, 8 January 2012 (UTC)