Edit-Patrolling Script Instructions

Introduction

Recent changes patrol is a feature that shows whether each edit has been checked to make sure it is a valid, good faith edit, and conforms to the policies of the wiki. It prevents a duplication of effort by clearly indicating which edits have and have not yet been checked by a member of the patrol.

This allows us to avoid performing the same work over and over, without knowing if somebody else has already handled the task.

If a certain series of edits has been inspected and deemed harmless, or easily fixed (By adjusting the grammar and structure, adding the three required standard categories, removing visual editor code, changing illogical statistics to unknown ratings, et cetera), we can easily mark them as patrolled, and nobody else will have to handle it.

Of course, this also means a responsibility to not mark edits as patrolled if you are uncertain about whether they are inaccurate or harmful, or what to do about them. This allows other staff members to inspect and evaluate them as well. Such instances should preferably also be handled by asking whoever made the edits to clarify/justify why they were made via their message walls.

In any case, here are some instructions about what you need to do in order to easily use the script within this wiki:

How to patrol edits

Edits that have not been checked will be preceded by a red exclamation mark on the Recent changes page.

To patrol an edit, click through to the diff page to find the "[Mark as patrolled]" link, as shown here:

Practical Usage

Here are useful pages for monitoring suspicious edits within this wiki, as they hide patrolled edits, which includes those of administrators and content moderators:

• 1000 unpatrolled edits

• 2000 unpatrolled edits

• 3000 unpatrolled edits

• 4000 unpatrolled edits

To use this, you click on the above bookmark, and open all the potentially suspicious edit histories in separate tabs via the "hist" buttons.

It is usually a good idea to write down the time that you left off previously in a personal notepad function, so you know where you should start, and which new edits that you need to inspect in the history sections.

Assume good faith

If there is a regular editor who as good as always seems to know what he or she is doing, you can usually filter them away, as they do not need supervision, and there are regrettably not enough hours in the day to check up absolutely everything, so you may have to focus on the most important parts instead.

However, it is preferable if you verify by checking a few of such members' edits sometimes, especially in cases when they have performed a long series of revisions.

Mass Patrol

When checking the difference between a series of edits, there should appear a “Mass Patrol” button that you can click in order to make sure that other staff members do not perform the same work.

However, do not use the old "Mark as patrolled" option, as it will both load slower and only mark this single edit as patrolled, rather than all recent previous ones for the page as well. This will recurrently cause it to show up in the recent changes page anyway.

Below are some screencapture images that illustrate what is intended in a more easily understood manner.

Vandalism and Disruptive editing

Vandalism

In the context of an online community project, vandalism is a usually a deliberate attempt to damage the usefulness of content for other viewers.

How to identify vandalism

To tell whether a bad edit is vandalism or just disruptive, consider the following:

• Vandalism is any deliberate attempt to disrupt the information within this wiki. Examples of vandalism include, but is not limited to:
  • Adding obviously false information.
  • Blanking pages for no reason.
  • Spamming links to unrelated websites.
  • Engaging in deliberate trolling or flame wars.

Dealing with vandalism

In general, the best ways to deal with vandalism are:

1. Reporting the user in our Wiki Vandalism Reports thread.
2. Blocking the user.
3. Reverting the vandalism by using the history sections for each affected wiki page to carefully check for the last stored past version for them that immediately preceded the beginning of the vandalising edits, and then either using the rollback function if only a single vandal was involved, or selecting the preceding stored page version and then clicking edit and save, if other edits by other users have been made after the vandalism began. However, in cases when those intermediate edits were constructive, you might have to manually copy-paste and reinsert that particular content in its correct place, if the required work is limited, or ask the member who originally applied the constructive edits, to do so again, via their wiki message wall.

Disruptive editing

Disruptive editing is a pattern of editing that disrupts progress towards the goals of this community. Cases of disruptive editing should take into account whether they violate our own rules, policies, and guidelines, and whether they go against Fandom's community guidelines.

Non-vandalistic disruptive editing is not as obvious and is often unintentional. Disruptive edits frequently occur with new editors, when they are not aware about all of our rules and conventions. For experienced editors, disruptive edits may occur because of lack of competence. The disruption occurring in good faith does not negate the fact that it is harmful to our community.

How to identify disruptive editing

There are many characteristics that distinguish disruptive editors from productive and competent editors. For example, a disruptive editor might:

• Be biased.
• Not have had their wiki revisions approved by our staff via our content revisions forum.
• Not listen or respond to staff instructions.
• Edit-war, or repeatedly reverting another's edits without participating in meaningful discussion.
• Engage in editing tests outside of personal user sandboxes, before becoming aware of the correct avenue for such testing.
• Create new pages that contain guesswork statistics without any valid justifications via calculation blogs in this wiki that have been accepted by our calc group members.
• Apply statistics changes to pages based on accepted calculation blogs for feats that already have other accepted calculation blogs, without first creating a discussion thread in our forum to let our calc group members decide which of them that seems most reliable.
• Repeatedly misuse categories or templates.
• Use inaccurate standard formatting that mess up our page structures. This type of disruptive editing is usually not a blockable offense, but you need to correct or revert it, and then explain on the responsible member's message wall how to use proper formatting. For some examples of pages depicting our formatting standards please see Standard Format for Character Profiles, Standard Format for Verse Pages, and Common Editing Mistakes.
• Add possibly false information that is not obviously false. Some information is not as easy/obvious to find/understand and needs a referenced source/link for it. Other information is more self-evident/obvious and doesn't require sources.
• Remove content that does (or possibly doesn't) belong, especially if there was no reason given for the removal. This also applies to the reverter if they did not explain why they reverted it and the reason is not obvious.

Not everyone can tell it is disruptive, so if you think it doesn't belong, then explain why it doesn't belong there. Some disruptive editing is done out of ignorance rather than malice.

How to deal with disruptive editing

Disruptive editing can be hard to deal with, depending on the type of disruption. Vandalism can be reverted as soon as it is identified. Do the following:

1. Undo/revert any edits that contain false information, are not properly sourced, or otherwise don't belong on the page. In the VS Battles wiki, all significant changes need to have been previously accepted by our staff members with evaluation rights (bureaucrats, administrators, thread/discussion moderators) in content revision threads in our forum, and this is required to be shown via links in the small edit summary boxes for the revised wiki pages.
2. If the bad edits return, then they should be undone/reverted again. Also, let the disruptive editor(s) know about the reasons why you reverted their edits since reverts do not cause automatic notifications.
3. Explain to the editor what they are doing wrong. For example, they might be using templates incorrectly or add categories that are not used on the community.
4. If you are an administrator, block the editor if they continue to disrupt and are not listening to any of your messages. Be sure to specify how they are causing harm or going against our accepted rules in the block reason.
5. If the user does not seem like a right fit for our community, then it might be best to inform them that it is likely better if they try a different one. Don't personally attack editors, but provide constructive feedback regarding how their behaviour must change if they want to continue editing. If their disruptive edits resume, longer and longer blocks may be warranted.
6. If a staff member is acting in a manner that is disruptive to our community, it is best to report them to our Human Resources group.

Uncertain Cases

Cases that may either be vandalism or disruptive editing, depending on their respective severity, and on whether the members who made them seem clueless and inexperienced or malicious:

• Changing statistics to previously existing character profile pages without preceding content revision threads in our forum that have been accepted by our staff members with evaluation rights.
• Making other significant content changes to our pages, such as to powers and abilities sections, without having them accepted beforehand.

Further Information

For further examples, please read our Editing Rules and Site Rules.