Wikipedia talk:Recent changes patrol

Archives

This page has archives. Sections older than 180 days may be auto-archived by if there are more than 4.

Join?

Do I have to join using some kind of process? Justjourney (talk) 23:03, 9 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Group edits: is it helpful for patrolling?

Dear Patrollers, I would like to ask your opinion of the enhanced view for tracking changes, listed as Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist in your Preferences.
The linked Help page mentions that losing the leading links for diff/hist can make patrolling more difficult and I wondered if that is accurate to your experience or if you have workaround solutions to account for this? And do you use this grouping edits feature and find it helpful or efficient for your anti-vandalism / patrolling tasks? Thank you, - Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 08:41, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Obvious vandalism missed last year?

Maybe it will be helpful for some script/bots/etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Science_fiction_(disambiguation)&diff=prev&oldid=1227691586 _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:31, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think I found one...

I might have found vandalism, but I will assume good faith and say he was just linking something.[1] here it is. Please notify me if this is a mistake, or hit me with a trout if needed. Thank you.

AstronomyKid1 (talk) 15:45, 23 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do I need to warn all users?

Should I place a warning on all talk pages of users that make non-constructive or vandalising edits? I've noticed a lot of these are just IPs who may make one edit and never edit again, and their IP may even be used by someone else later. Is it still a good practice to place a warning message on their talk page? SnowyRiver28 (talk) 08:48, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@SnowyRiver28: this is a complicated topic. Most users on IPv6 connections are going to cycle rather rapidly so if the edit is more than an hour old or so a warning will probably never reach anyone. Warning isn't really incorrect per se but it is unlikely to accomplish anything either. Same goes for users on dynamic IPv4 connections though the time scale may be longer. Even with accounts, if an edit was made more than a few days ago and the account has never edited again it probably won't. Worst case scenario in all of these if they do reactivate is getting in one more edit before being reported to AIV; not that big a deal. With clear tests or jokes that seem unlikely to repeat I may not warn even if it isn't all that stale especially if originating from IPv6, but it's a judgement call.

In general, LTAs do not need to be warned either, they already know what they are doing is wrong. As a heuristic pay as little attention to them as practical and DENY. Sometimes if they just used an IP briefly but you expect they may reuse it in the future after a delay {{uw-multipleIPs}} can be useful as a mark for future patrollers, but as with so many things it's a judgement call.

As a converse, if an account or IP has made two or more disruptive edits at intervals of more than a few minutes you will want to warn unless the delay is much longer than the interval since that indicates the connection is stable over that time. It may also simply be a shared connection but warnings have there use in that case as well.

Hopefully that clears things up a bit. 184.152.65.118 (talk) 16:54, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for the detailed response! Very much appreciated :) SnowyRiver28 (talk) 01:14, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]