Talk: Watchdogs

NP Patrol Discussion page

Leave any questions or comments you have about the NP Patrol here...

What does patrolled mean?

When we mark a page as 'patrolled', what does that do? --Sting-Ray ZA 01:41, 5 June 2006 (EDT)

Nevermind - I think I answered my own question :P It seems to change the color of that page on the 'New Pages' page --Sting-Ray ZA 01:54, 5 June 2006 (EDT)

It removes the ! in Special:Recentchanges. It seems like you only get the [ Mark as patrolled ] link when you do a diff from the Recent changes page.

Marking as patrolled doesn't clear the annoying yellow from New pages list, it looks like when a new page is edited (changes after new page), the yellow clears. --Fandyllic 4:06 PM PDT 9 Jun 2006

Erhm, clicking the [Mark this page as patrolled] in the bottom right hand corner unmarks it in the New pages list. Pages stay "New" no matter the amount of edits until they've been marked as patrolled. --Mikk 07:36, 23 June 2006 (EDT)

Are you sure? My brief observation of the behavior of Special:Newpages is that they unmark far more often than pages get marked patrolled, but I could be wrong. I generally only patrol some of the edits in the WoWWiki: namespace... I wonder who is patrolling other stuff? --Fandyllic 8:43 PM PDT 24 Jun 2006

Well, I'm sure insofar as this is how it worked when I went and tested it on a couple of pages. I'd edited one of my pages about half a dozen times, and it was still showing up marked here. Then I clicked [Mark this page as patrolled] in the bottom right corner, and it unmarked. Can't say I've gone and actually dug around in the MediaWiki code on the matter though :-)   --Mikk 06:13, 25 June 2006 (EDT)

Horrible new pages yellow!

Is there any way we can get the New Pages page to look/work like the Recent Changes page? The red ! is much friendlier than the stark yellowy-whitey color... --Sting-Ray ZA 07:18, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

I think Rustak can change it (by a stylesheet or something) so it is a different color. I may bug him soon about it. --Fandyllic 3:55 PM PDT 9 Jun 2006

I've mailed a new stylesheet to Rustak with various little fixes. Among other things, the horrible horrible yellow background is history. --Mikk 17:55, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Tadaa! Readable! Except I see now that a listing style that I changed bled through to that page also, which I didn't intend. Imo it gets a little cramped now with the smaller font. I'd fix it, except I can't, easily >.<   --Mikk 14:55, 20 June 2006 (EDT)

I love it! Thanks Mikk! --Sting-Ray ZA 05:09, 23 June 2006 (EDT)

WoW, I'm so clueless. Thanks Mikk. --Fandyllic 8:45 PM PDT 24 Jun 2006

Heads up: New guild page policy

Just a quick heads-up for you guys. There's a new guild page policy in effect as of today. Among other things, (near) blank guild pages are required to be tagged with Template:Tlink. If you guys could help out with that, that'd be dandy :-)   Thanks!   --Mikk 17:57, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Inappropriate content in New pages

• See Doomhammer Boodah. Mark as SpeedyDelete? --Dracomage 07:27, 20 June 2006 (EDT)

• That's personal defamation and should be speedydeleted. Might want to issue a warning somehow. Dunno how that works. Someone else will. --Mikk 10:54, 20 June 2006 (EDT)

• Bad Cow Puns what to do with this? --Dracomage 07:41, 20 June 2006 (EDT)

• Lol. Category:Silly? =) --Mikk 10:54, 20 June 2006 (EDT)

• Natathel -- Marking as SpeedyDelete... --Sting-Ray ZA 05:44, 23 June 2006 (EDT)

• Less Stupid Rumored Races Um... I think this was a stub thrown off by energetic debate at Talk:Rumored_Races, but now it's kind of a weak page to leave out there. I'm a new user myself and not sure what to do. Flag it? Vote for deletion? Merge? Redirect? Luci 16:44, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

My gut feel would be to just move the content to a new section in Talk:Rumored_Races and make the "Less..." a redirect to there. If the author objects, he can always revert. (Make a note in Talk:.. that you copied the content from the original page) --Mikk 19:52, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

Done. Thanks. Learning more every day. Luci 06:56, 29 June 2006 (EDT)

Empty New pages

What to do? Spotted a user go on a rampage creating zero-content pages (other than name, stub and cats). Please see User:Rascilon contributions (look at the new pages). Advice? --Dracomage 13:47, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

Wanted to ask the same question - these are obviously bots creating those pages just out of some weird WoW addon. They could at least provide location info etc. thats available ingame. Also I think Bots should be marked as those and get a separate user like its common procedure in wikipedia (Mikk's bot too, though he marks botted edits and keeps them low.) . Also creating new pages and stubbing them for others to provide the actual content is somehow useless. New pages with stubs should only created with the intent to enhance them in the near future, and bots don't intend anything. -watchout 04:42, 19 September 2006 (EDT)

We talked to Rascilon and he wasn't using a bot as far as can be determined (you could ask him directly). In theory, any bots should be part of the Bots user group (select Bots from Group menu and click Go) for them to be effective. Currently we only have User:Mikkbot in that group. --Template:Adminsig 11:07 AM PDT 19 Sep 2006

Sorry my fault, I didnt mean Rascilon - I meant in general, one of those being Umbra.  [Master Sergeant's Insignia] - this page was created a week ago, more than 100 new (almost empty) item pages go between, there was obviously no intent to extend it or even clarify the external links. This pages have absolutely no value in my opinion.

Ok, maybe they are no bots but users. Creating hundreds of almost empty pages and then stubbing them. where's the reason? -watchout 02:47, 20 September 2006 (EDT)

Hm. Just creating completely empty pages and stubbing them is one thing. But those external links are actually useful - at least, in my opinion. - My Template:C   --Mikk (T) 05:04, 20 September 2006 (EDT)

Come on, this is a wiki and not an item database, thott, allakhazam, goblinworkshop and all those have a much greater database and are due to their nature alone more accurate, have better search utilities and whatnot... -watchout 06:50, 20 September 2006 (EDT)

Making empty stubbed pages I am mostly against ... however, I'm not tooo worried about pages which are mostly an external link - as long as that page is linked from elsewhere in the wiki, such as from a instance loot table page as such pages are more likely to be visited and have their info added at some stage. I say this because the fewer giant lists of external links we have, the better. But pages that aren't referenced from anywhere else on the wiki and are tiny do seem a little pointless. -- Kirkburn (talk) 09:29, 20 September 2006 (EDT)

Kirkburn's "linked vs not linked" argument is very valid imo. I wonder what the case is with these only-external-link pages...   --Mikk (T) 11:22, 20 September 2006 (EDT)

I think we should talk about cases like  [Master Sergeant's Insignia] though, since it has multiple external links to the same DB site (3 sets of external links to Thottbot, Allakhazam and Wowhead). This is confusing in the very least and some effort should be made to distinguish multiple links to the same sites. This isn't really a NP Patrol issue, but probably more of a Commentators issue. I will try to summarize this issue and place it at WoWWiki:Requests for comment. --Fandyllic (talk) 5:06 PM PDT 20 Sep 2006

No Content Pages

While I don't appreciate my contributions being considered a 'rampage', I believe I was operating in accordance to the stub policy. If this is not correct, please let me know and revise this policy page. Stub Policy

"Throughout WoWWiki are articles with little or no content that have been created with the intention of filling them in. These are refered to as stubs and are tagged specifically to tell visitors that they are, in fact, stubs, and to make it easier for other contributors to find them."

--Rascilon 1:50, 16, August 2006 (PST)

Yup, Rascilon has it right. I can see why there was initial concern, but I think it is eventually all for the good. Unstubbed new pages with no content are really what we should worry about. --Fandyllic 12:23 PM PDT 17 Aug 2006

Very good. Thank you for the feedback. --Dracomage 14:44, 17 August 2006 (EDT)

New Pages not showing up as Un-patrolled?

Since the weekend None of the new pages added is showing up as "not patrolled"?? Any ideas? --Dracomage 11:30, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

? They're showing up in Special:Newpages just fine for me, and nicely marked with red squares.   --Mikk (T) 11:43, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

Checked again. Nothing for me - they all appear "patrolled". Have I been RIF-ed from the NP Patrol? :P --Dracomage 13:18, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

Hrm. Could be a browser bug I suppose. What are you running? I've tested with Firefox 1.5, Opera 8, Opera 9 and IE 6. IE 6 "sort of " works. I need to mouse over the links before the colorization takes effect. No surprise there :-(   --Mikk (T) 14:28, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

Firefox 1.5. Even if I visit any of the new pages, they do not have the "click here to mark as patrolled"? I'm very confused. --Dracomage 15:23, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

Ahhh. That sounds like the Squid web accelerator playing games. Try hitting shift+reload on the page.   --Mikk (T) 16:04, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

Mikk are you talking about whether articles are "visited" or patrolled? There is a red bar that should change color or disappear if a new page has been patrolled, but the pages don't seem to show their patrolled status in Special:Newpages. --Fandyllic 4:01 PM PDT 6 Sep 2006

Ehm, both. I thought it was the red bars first, but then Dracomage talked about the "mark as patrolled"..

But now you're saying it's the red bars that are missing - for you also?

Have you tried shift+reload in Special:Newpages?

Both work for me. I get a red mark in Special:Newpages, and I get the "mark as patrolled" link in the pages.   --Mikk (T) 20:28, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

Okay, I can get the "mark as patrolled" link, but the red bar seems to still be on new pages that have had at least one edit after creation in Special:Newpages, but only in some cases. I'm wondering if there is some flag on a user that make them a valid "patroller" so the red bar goes away?

I only had a vague notion of how Special:Newpages worked before, but now I have no idea. --Fandyllic 7:09 PM PDT 6 Sep 2006

Okay.. I've tested with a non-admin user. There are no red blocks in Special:Newpages, and there are no "[mark as patrolled"] links in new pages. Looking at pages linked from Special:Recentchanges, there's no "[mark as patrolled]" in the diff header.

There has to be something new that you need to configure for RC/NP patrol users, that Admins have enabled by default. Time to go digging? (I assume Fandyllic is the one that has to do this; fiddling user rights tends to require Bureaucrat admin status.)

  --Mikk (T) 22:41, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

Thanks Mikk. Hope Mr F and Mr R can get to the bottom of this. --Dracomage 23:13, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

As a bureaucrat, I appear to only have the ability to assign users to groups, not fiddle with the rights of any groups. Sorry... :-( --Fandyllic 10:32 PM PDT 7 Sep 2006

This has now been fixed. Rustak set up a "patrollers" user group with permission to do RC/NP patrolling. Fandyllic has made all of the RC/NP teams members of this user group.

We also had the option of going back to the way it was before - where all users were able to patrol edits, but this seemed the better choice - this way, vandals can't mark their work patrolled themselves.

  --Mikk (T) 21:47, 10 September 2006 (EDT)

Yeah! Back to working!--Dracomage 10:35, 11 September 2006 (EDT)

Guild Stubs

I created a little bot script to help with the guild-stub issue... User:Watchoutbot/GuildStubAge - I see if I can do a little cronjob and run the bot every day if you like so -watchout 07:21, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

Nice one! Add it to Category:Things to do.   --Mikk (T) 09:13, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

I'm still a bit busy with the script, but I got the bot to submit the content itself and added the category. Maybe I will do the same for Stubs/Player.

Oh and... We don't have something like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php by chance? *cough* -watchout 12:02, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

Mmmm I'd like that one, too. My suggestion would be to go dig the script up and mail it to Rustak and say "pweetty pweeaaase" :-)   --Mikk (T) 12:57, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

The query API can be found here Wikipedia:User:Yurik/Query_API, though I'm not sure how secure this thing is despite the fact that it's running on the en.wikipedia. So I want to check it out before I recommend this thing to anyone ;) -watchout 17:47, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

Oh, two more things: poke Fandyllic about bot flagging your bot account, and ..hmm.. maybe we can think of a better name for that page... Or perhaps you should replace the category tag with a <noinclude>Template:Tlink</noinlcude> and we include it into something in the WoWWiki namespace where we can edit categorization and descriptions at will. Hm, yeah, that strikes me as a better idea, actually.   --Mikk (T) 13:00, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

No please, actually I put it on my bot's userpages because I didnt know how good my script was and what side effects happen. Some things you can only test on the running environment, and I was not sure how good my idea was - and... I know no better name, but there somewhere in the twisting nether, there must be one!

Using an other page is a matter of changing one string so no real need for inclusion, but shouldnt it be <includeonly> instead of <noinclude> ? Ah no, now I get it, ok yes good idea - so we need a page name and I can reduce the bot to only post the list and point it to pagename/data or whatever. right?

Oh, and if you like some more info from the bot, just tell me. Currently I'm parsing the normal article page, but I'd like to parse the history page in the future and get author's names etc. maybe even find out when the article was stubbed.

About the bot usergroup, I thought you can botflag the user, but no problem I will /poke fandyllic until he gives up and /slap's back -watchout 17:47, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

Nope, only admins with Special:Listusers/Bureaucrat powers can do that.   --Mikk (T) 18:09, 22 September 2006 (EDT)