I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while and thought I’d share some of my thoughts:
Staff accounts such as Seymour Edits and wikiHow Projects don’t have their edits autopatrolled. In this template
, it clearly states in bold that these edits shouldn’t be reverted, so I don’t really understand the point of making volunteers review edits we can’t revert. In this template
, it states that excessive chatting creates extra work for volunteers, but personally I find that there are more staff edits than chatting messages. In fact, I probably spend more time patrolling staff edits than any other edits just due to the sheer number of edits staff makes.
The first template mentions typos, but I haven’t encountered any major typos/mistakes coming from these accounts (which is a good thing!). Plus, WRM and admins are equally likely to make typos, and their edits are autopatrolled (in the case of WRM, its articles don’t need to go through NAB). Not to mention that we have the spellchecker tool.
Any opinions on this?
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Eric
3
I am neutral on this, but I’m glad you brought it up for discussion. I could get behind having staff accounts auto-patrolled if others are on board.
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I would definitely be on board with having these types of accounts be auto-patrolled.
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I don’t know if there is a significant benefit to autopatrolling staff edits. After all, staff are humans too
On the other hand, I don’t think there is a significant drawback to having staff edits not autopatrolled. If a user does not know how to patrol edits correctly, they should not be patrolling edits at all.
As a compromise, I think a good option would be to allow staff to patrol their own edits (if that is not already done). That does not mean they are always marked as patrolled; the addition of images by Wikivisual and the cleanup of redlinks by WikiHow Projects are edits that should be autopatrolled. On the other hand, edits by WRM or Seymour Edits might still need human review, especially after a rewrite.
Maybe the software gives a note in RC patrol that the edit was made by staff. Something along the lines of “This edit was made by a wikiHow staff member. Please mark this edit as patrolled unless if there are serious problems with the content that the staff member provided.”
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Reviewing SE’s changes by RC Patrol isn’t necessary. When Anna was around, she told me that there is an internal review anyways. I imagine that has not changed.
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Yeah, that’s fair. Usually, though, when I see Seymour Edits or wikiHow Projects in RC Patrol, their edits are maintenance-style (for example, Seymour Edits adding expert citations or wikiHow Projects adding internal links). Here’s a gif of me patrolling to show what I mean (skipping non-staff edits to save time). I think, for starters, at least autopatrolling these types of edits would be beneficial.
It does not mean that there can’t be problems though. Even staff make mistakes sometimes, like typos or word salad. That is the whole point of RC patrol.
For something that is very very unlikely to have any problems such as removing broken images or replacing URLs, I think that would be a good case for autopatrolled. But rewriting an article or adding images to an article are two areas where things can go wrong on accident.
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Also, I’m going to move this thread to Village Pump because I think it’s more of a proposal than a question.
Batreeq
11
What I mean is that last I know, staff are already doing an “internal patrol” of major edits like that.
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To be fair, small typos/errors may be initially overlooked by a patroller anyway. Spelling errors will appear in the spellchecker regardless of who they’re by and if they’re autopatrolled or not.
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I am not sure about the detailed mechanics of the process that “staff” writers go through, but, from looking at some edit histories, it seems that there might be multiple stages in the editing process whereby edits are reviewed, refined, and finalized by one or more members of the “staff contingent”. Further, it seems that the actual status of these articles might be akin to volunteer “inuse” editing. In other words, edits, if made while patrolling, might result in edit conflicts which would add burden to the process of finalizing these articles.
This leads me to thinking that it might be better
, if possible, to create a tag specific to staff edits (along with software) which would keep the revisions out of recent change patrol until the tag was removed, at which time all accumulated edits could be patrolled at one time. The same mechanism might also be used for the inuse tag. These two situations seem to me to be analogous in that, in each case, a patroller faces the conundrum of whether to actually edit the article or to feedback in another way (so as to avoid potential edit conflicts).
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To be fair, there is a staffinuse
template, but it doesn’t have any function in keeping it out of patrol (to my knowledge).
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JayneG
15
I just wanted to pop in to mention that I don’t think we’re going to be able to set the Seymour Edits account to autopatrol
I liked the idea so I did some testing, but that account is not the same as our accounts. It’s linked to a range of editor accounts and then shows their edits as Seymour Edits without everyone needing to log into the same account. So, unfortunately autopatrol won’t work like it does for other admin accounts.
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Ah, got it – thanks for trying! Is this the same for wikiHow Projects?
Is it possible to at least give a warning to the patroller if they are rolling back an edit made by wikiHow staff? Even if it is just in the RC patrol tool and not in traditional RC patrol it would still reduce the amount of false positives.
This might be a better message from Patrol Coach:
Hi, I am the Patrol Coach! I just wanted to let you know that this edit was made by a member of wikiHow staff and is extremely unlikely to have any problems that warrant rolling back this edit. If you noticed a simple spelling mistake, you can fix it simply by clicking “Quick Edit” and then “Publish”. If you have any questions regarding this staff edit, you may contact (contact).[ Okay, got it ] [ Rollback anyway ]
It can be frustrating when non-problematic edits are rolled back by new users not knowing what they are doing.
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JayneG
18
@FlowerPower555
I just tested wikiHow Projects today and it looks like that account can be autopatrolled, so let’s try that for a little bit to see how it goes
@Awesome_Aasim
That’s an interesting idea - although Patrol Coach can’t work with real-time edits, I can look at adding an SE edit into the patrol coach rotation!
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Thank you so much! That’ll be a huge time saver
.
Well… the MW API can fetch the roles of specific users to see if they are staff, and the tool is a JavaScript tool after all…
So I figure a warning would be feasible to put in, although it would require some engineer time.
JayneG
21
Just bumping the thread to let y’all know that we have a SE edit in the Patrol Coach rotation now. It will only be shown to newer patrollers, so I’ll post a screenshot of it below for all you experienced folk who will miss out
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