Help:Administrator's Handbook/Recent Changes Patrol

The Recent Changes Patrol consists of examining recent edits to the wiki for test edits, blanking of pages, vandalism, and other negative changes. There is a link to "Recent changes" on the sidebar at the left. Any user can use this page and help revert vandalism. However, only sysops can block users and delete bad pages. Thus it is important for sysops to sometimes inspect recent changes and stop persistent spammers and vandals. There is also the patrol tool which both gives unmarked edits an exclamation point in the Recent Changes page, and a Special:Patrol which will go through recent edits allowing marking of new edits automatically.

Every recent edit appears in Recent Changes. Thus, if a page is edited twice, both the new edit and previous edit appear. Thus, it is not possible to hide an edit by making another edit.

Types of bad edits

 * Creation of new speedy deletion candidates. Sysops are in position to delete obvious junk pages that some users create.
 * Spam. Some users like to add spam to wikis, adding lots of links to their own web sites so that their search-engine rankings increase. A common tactic of Spammers is to use CSS to hide spam so that readers do not see it, but search engines do. However, such spam becomes obvious when editing a page or viewing a diff.
 * Blanking. Bots or vandals that delete chunks of pages, apparently at random. These will be obvious in recent changes from the large decrease in size of a page. However, not all shrinking of pages are Blanking; the page may be turned into a Disambiguation page for example, so do not revert an edit simply because the page shrank.

Types of users
There are generally five kinds of users that make edits.
 * Frequent contributors make the most edits. Often, these users are most recognizable as they edit consistently and constantly. Most people who reach this status should be given the "Autopatrolled" status so their edits are not marked as suspicious by the Patrol tool, as they are unlikely to vandalize. Their edits may still be checked manually, for minor things like spelling errors, anyway.
 * Semi-experienced contributors usually have names that appear in green, meaning that they have user pages. A user is more likely to check unfrequent contributors contributors than these.
 * Unfrequent contributors often have names that appear in yellow, because they have no user page. Many of these contributors are new users with good intentions. However, vandals and sockpuppets who want to hide their IP address or use the page-move feature often create user accounts.
 * IP addresses edit the wiki without creating an account. Like all users, these users are more prone to fix errors in pages than create them. However, spammers tend not to create accounts. Thus users tend to check these edits most carefully and often.
 * Brand new contributors are people who have their account creation very close to often a large number of contributions. These deserve some special attention because even when they are not doing vandalism, they are not likely to be familiar with policies on Pikmin Fanon or do quite a bit of experimentation.  Be extra careful with these people as they are more likely to become the regular contributors of the future and are the source of new help for the project.  Still, watch carefully for vandalism from these editors or for sockpuppeting, especially if they create a user page as one of their first edits.