User blog:Blupo/Monitoring the Wiki

Here's a guide for how to "moderate" the wiki from bad edits.

But Blupo, you say, ''I'm not a moderator. Come to think of it, you're not one either.''

I may not be a moderator, or an admin, or anything near it, but you don't have to be if you want to keep the wiki free from bad edits.

Recent Changes Allow me to introduce you to the Recent Changes page. Maybe you already know its little brother, the Wiki Activity page.

Recent Changes (and Wiki Activity, to some extent) allow you to see what people are changing on the wiki. It's a feed of every single change on the wiki. You can see detailed changes, as well as change things such as what namespaces they come from, how long ago they can be from, etc. Recent Changes also shows when someone redirects a page, changes a template, when a bot edits (not that you'd ever need to see these), or when someone rolls back a page. Read w:Help:RecentChanges for more information.

From Recent Changes, you can undo edits and view page histories. You can also see how much a page has changed in terms of size.

You should probably hide grouped recent changes if you want to keep up with the latest edits and not be confused when a page with 10 different editors gets moved up to the top of the list for the umpteenth time. If you don't want to see new page comments with "SELLING POLYCHROME SNOWFLAKES FOR 100K VEL" constantly spam the Recent Changes you can filter out the Talk namespace.

History & Contributions History is a list of edits for a page's edit history. Likewise, Contributions is a list of edits for a user's edit history. Both act similarly to the Recent Changes, but they allow you to see all edits for a page/by a user. To access a page's history, click on the arrow next to the EDIT button on any page, and click on History. To see a user's contributions, go to their User page and click on the Contributions tab.

JavaScript If you want even more power to keep the wiki clean, then you can use JavaScript. Of course, you shouldn't abuse this power. First, read w:Help:Personal CSS and JS, and make sure that you have personal JS enabled.

Things that you should add:
 * AjaxRC: Automatically refreshes the Recent Changes page so that you don't have to.
 * QuickDiff: Lets you view diffs without having to be redirected to the diff page. Useful if you need to quickly browse through diffs.
 * AbuseLogRC: Since this wiki has AbuseFilter (read more here) enabled, this script allows you to see when the filter is triggered by an edit. You are not meant to take action based on the filter's actions. The filter is automatic for a reason, and you probably have no reason to worry about why it triggered. It's just there if you want to see it.

Also some nice things to add:
 * EditConflictAlert: Tells you when someone is trying to publish an edit at the same time you are.
 * LastEdited: Shows you information about a page's last edit without having to go to the history or Recent Changes (i.e. shows the last edit's info on the page itself).

Keep in mind that your pages might start slowing down if you add too many scripts.

Disruptive Users If a user is intentionally breaking the Guidelines, you're best option is getting some help. However, most disruptive users seem to stop after a while. If there are no admins online (or you don't feel like calling one), you can probably wait it out and then undo their edits. Don't try to undo a disruptive user's edits while they're still active. The user will probably keep undoing your undos (maybe intentionally), and you'll get into what Wikipedia calls an edit war, and they aren't very helpful for anyone.

Call an Admin/Moderator If all else fails, message an admin or moderator. They're here to help keep the wiki clean too. You can also contact them on the Discord.

References