Patrols are used in Wikipedia to watch over a class of pages and take any appropriate actions. Most patrol actions are performed by individual Wikipedians, but some are performed by bots - computer programs or preprogrammed scripts that make automated edits without a need for real time human decision-making.

There is a great need for patrols in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is big. In fact, Wikipedia is huge. To help editors maintain reasonable quality on an encyclopedia this size, that almost anyone can edit, a number of Wikipedia community members have set up long-standing patrols. These patrols focus on various edits and feeds, and their members watch these feeds in the background, or from time to time, or really, whenever they like. Many of the well-known patrols have hundreds of users, and are directly responsible as a first line against vandalism, or other potential problems that may happen.

Why not join in?

[edit] Patrols

• Article Rescue Squadron (members) - Patrols AfD for articles to rescue by adding referenced material.
• BLPWatch - Bot patrol of articles containing biographical material based on request.
• Disambiguation pages with links (members) - Patrols the Special:WhatLinksHere for disambiguation pages having incoming links.
• Help Page Patrol (members) - Patrols the help desk and help users who tag their user spaces with {{helpme}}.
• Living People Patrol (members) - Manual patrol of articles containing biographical material based on request.
• New pages patrol (members) - Patrols newly created pages to improve them and provide assistance to edits made by new users unfamiliar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.
• Random page patrol (members) - Patrols article pages randomly accessed through Special:Random.
• Recent changes patrol (members) - Patrols recent changes to article pages for harmful edits.
• Typo Team (members) - Patrols article pages to correct typos and misspellings.
• Unreferenced articles (members) - Patrols articles listed at Category:Articles lacking sources.
• WikiProject Categories/uncategorized (members) - Patrols Category:Wikipedia backlog to categorizing articles that are uncategorized.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Copyright patrol (members) - Patrols pages listed at Category:Possible copyright violations to address raised copyright issues.
• WikiProject New Zealand/Vandalism patrol - Patrols Category:New Zealand pages for vandal edits.
• WikiProject proposed deletion patrolling (members) - Patrols articles categorized into all articles proposed for deletion to assist in Wikipedia's proposed deletion process.
• WikiProject Reference Tags (members) - Patrols articles to convert old reference templates into the most current reference templates.

[edit] Inactive patrols

• AfD Patrol - Patrols AfD to moderate the discussions with constructive comments.
• Policy patrol (members) - Patrols Wikipedia pages related to policy, guideline and certain essay and untagged pages to review recent changes to those pages.
• Speedy deletion patrol (members) - Patrols recently deleted articles to undelete articles not properly deleted speedy deletion policy.

[edit] Patrol templates

Code	Result	Users
{{Template:User Unreferenced Articles}}	UA This user helps with a drive to add citations to unreferenced articles.	Transclusions
{{Template:User wikipedia/BLPWatch Patrol}}	This user is a BLPWatch patroller.	Transclusions
{{Template:User wikipedia/NP Patrol}}	This user is a newpage patroller.	Transclusions
{{Template:User wikipedia/PROD Patrol}}	This user is a proposed deletion patroller.	Transclusions
{{Template:User wikipedia/RC Patrol}}	This user is a recent changes patroller.	Transclusions
{{Template:User wikipedia/RP Patrol}}	This user is a random page patroller.	Transclusions
{{Template:Uw-patrolled}}	Hello. When you patrol new pages, all articles that you have looked at should be marked patrolled, whether you marked them for deletion or deemed them acceptable, unless you are not sure. This saves time and work by informing fellow patrollers of your review of the page so that they do not duplicate efforts. Thank you.	Transclusions

[edit] See also

• Help:Patrolled edit
• Wikipedia:New pages patrol/patrolled pages
• Wikipedians by Wikipedia collaboration
• Wikipedian page patrollers