Wikipedia:Patrollers

Patrollers are trusted users who can mark newly created pages on Special:NewPages as patrolled. If they create a new page, it will automatically be marked as patrolled.

Patrollers are trusted to not add inappropriate material to the Simple English Wikipedia, and make a lot of new pages that do not require patrolling.

Administrators can grant this right at their discretion to trusted users who regularly create articles and have demonstrated they are familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines (especially Wikipedia:BLP, Wikipedia:Copyright, Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Notability). The user right is not normally given to new users, regardless of the number of articles created.

If you wish to request the patroller user right for yourself or another user, please see Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Patroller. Administrators do not need to request or add this user right for themselves or other administrators; it is automatically granted as an administrator tool.

Patroller is available to all 16 Wikipedia administrators, and there are 144 users with the patroller permission. In total, 160 editors have patroller rights.

How it works

An example of patrolling a page

Normal process

A person without the patroller right creates a page. The MediaWiki software immediately lists the page at Special:NewPages. A user with the patroller right will review the article.

Patroller process

A person with the patroller right creates a page. The MediaWiki software immediately list the page at Special:NewPages. The software (rather than a human) marks the page as patrolled.

How to patrol

Patrolling new pages is an important job that helps in maintaining quality of pages in the encyclopedia. A page being marked as patrolled doesn't necessarily mean the page is perfect or complete, it just means that it meets the basic criteria to be in the encyclopedia.

The first thing to remember while patrolling is that you should only mark the pages that you are sure about as patrolled. If you are unsure whether to mark a page as patrolled or not, you can just skip the page and move to next one. This will leave the page yellow at the new pages list and give others chance to review the page.

Here is a list of things that a patroller needs to consider before marking the page as patrolled:

• The page isn't eligible for quick deletion under any criteria.
• The title of the page should be correct (per WP:MOS).
• The content of the page should be wikified to a certain extent. This includes link to other pages, bold and italics text where needed, infobox, pictures etc.
• The content of the page should be simplified to certain extent.
• There should not be significant grammar errors on the page. It should make sense.
• There should at least be one reference for verifiability unless the subject is very common like eg. 'Apple'.
• The page mentions why the subject is important or claims that the subject is notable. This means the page isn't eligible for quick deletion for the lack of notability (WP:QD#A4).
• References and other websites should be properly formatted. Appropriate sections should be added for them if there isn't one yet.
• The page should be properly categorized. It is a good idea to put the page in at least one of the suitable existing categories.
• The page should be properly tagged. This doesn't mean one can just bomb a page with tags. This is only for the necessary tags like merge and stub tags which generally encourage editing.

Related pages

• Wikipedia:Administrators
• Special:ListGroupRights - more about the rights of the different user groups

Other websites

• en:Wikipedia:New pages patrol – English Wikipedia page with information on what to look for when patrolling pages