Meta:Patrollers

Patrollers on Meta are users who have the ability to mark other non-administrator, autopatrolled, or patrollers' edits as "patrolled" ("approved" or "reviewed"). Patrolling helps administrators and other patrollers coordinate their efforts against spam and ensure all edits are reviewed for compliance with local policies. Even if an edit goes against local policy, patrollers still mark it reviewed and then take appropriate action.

Appointment and Revocation
Patrollers are appointed by administrators at their discretion. Users may request the right at the Administrators' noticeboard. Likewise, patrollers may have their rights revoked at the discretion of an administrator.

There is no set list of criteria that users must fulfill to be appointed to patroller or have the right revoked. Each administrator has their own criteria for appointing or revoking a patroller's flag though revocation is rare if the right is used correctly in compliance with the guidelines below.

Guidelines
The following are some of the main guidelines for patrolling. If you, as a patroller, follow these guidelines completely, it is unlikely your patroller user group should ever be revoked. In technical terms, even when you find content that requires deletion by an administrator or otherwise requires remediation, undoing, reverting, or rolling back (if you are also a, of course), you should always first mark as patrolled any revisions regardless of whether that content is destined to remain extant to the page or even on Meta entirely.


 * 1) When patrolling talk pages, user talk pages, and noticeboards (in Main and Meta namespaces), you should first check to see whether the user properly signed their posts using four tildes . If they have not, you should add unsigned by substitution, where username is the user's username or IP address and the timestamp is the full timestamp from the diff page. As a best practice, you should also link to the diff in your edit summary, so other administrators and patrollers can easily tie your modification to the original edit being modified. To speed up this process, you can copy the   user script from line 5 of this page into either your (a) common.js or (b) global.js page (the latter applying globally on all Miraheze wikis);
 * 2) When patrolling the noticeboards, ask yourself whether this topic is on the correct noticeboard. If it is not, you should move it to the correct noticeboard, by either undoing the edit or manually removing the topic (if there have been intervening edits), again linking to the original noticeboard of the topic and the new noticeboard where it was moved in your edit summary. On the new noticeboard, you would simply paste in the topic (including the section header), linking to the diff page as in the first step. An example edit summary might be , where  ######  represents the numeric revision ID of the originally posted topic;
 * 3) Also when patrolling the noticeboards and talk pages (including user talk pages), as a best practice, take care to kindly fix any formatting mistakes (such as excess line breaks or incorrect wiki code), per WP:LISTGAP;
 * 4) If something requires deletion, you can add delete to the top of the page in question, taking care to follow the instructions on that template page;
 * 5) If you come across a user who repeatedly makes the same mistakes, send them a guidance note on their user talk page, informing of the steps need to edit and post constructively on Meta; and, finally,
 * 6) If in doubt whether something requires remediation or not, patrol it, and then ask any administrator via their user talk page or at Administrators' noticeboard if any further action needs to be taken.