The autopatrolled (formerly autoreviewer) user right is intended to reduce the workload of new page patrollers. Articles that are created by accounts with the autopatrolled flag will be automatically set as patrolled by the MediaWiki software. This permission is granted only to accounts that have extensively demonstrated their knowledge of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, and create articles often enough to make it more efficient to mark them as approved automatically.
The English Wikipedia has 3,438 users with the autopatrolled explicitly granted, and a total of 4,734 users with the permission (the rest are administrators).
Contents
Autopatrolled accounts' abilities
Accounts with the autopatrolled user right have no additional technical abilities compared to accounts that do not have it. The only difference that occurs is a change in the software process that occurs after an account creates a new article.
Process comparison
A comparison of the software process that occurs with accounts with and without the account creator user right are listed below:
- Normal process
- A person without the autopatrolled right creates a page. The MediaWiki software immediately lists the page at Special:NewPagesFeed as "unreviewed" and highlights the article's entry at Special:NewPages in yellow. A human patroller, as part of the New Page Patrol process, reviews the articles to identify articles which do not meet the criteria for inclusion and/or to tag them for any glaring issues that need attention. Most critically the articles are screened for copyright violations, defamatory material about living persons, conflicts of interest, and advertising. After this manual review the reviewer marks the page patrolled.
- Autopatrolled process
- A person with the autopatrolled right creates a page. The MediaWiki software lists the page at Special:NewPages but marks it as patrolled and does not highlight it in yellow; the page is automatically listed at Special:NewPagesFeed as "reviewed". The software (rather than a human) marks the page as patrolled.
Items to note
- The autopatrolled right will not help you create articles. This user right is assigned to prolific creators of clean articles in order to reduce the work load of New Page Patrollers, not to help the article creators.
- Inexperienced editors will typically not be granted this right. Because this user right bypasses Wikipedia's human-based screening projects, the community needs to trust that you're creating good-quality articles on notable topics. If you have little experience, or if your experience suggests only a partial understanding of the relevant policies and guidelines, then you do not qualify for this user right.
- New pages patrollers will not benefit from this user right. The autopatrolled right only serves to reduce the backlog by automatically patrolling trusted users' articles; it does not affect the patrolling experience, or editors who use Wikipedia tools to patrol pages.
- Article expanders also do not benefit from this user right. The user right only affects newly created pages. If you're expanding a page that someone else has already created, or if you are changing a redirect into an article, this user right will serve no effect.
autopatrol
also takes effect on new pages outside of the article namespace. If an autopatrolled user creates a new Template talk page, the page's revision is also automatically marked patrolled.- Files uploaded or re-uploaded by autopatrolled users are also automatically patrolled.
Becoming an autopatrolled account
Any administrator can grant the autopatrolled right at their discretion. The right is typically given to trusted users who regularly create articles and have demonstrated they are familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, especially those on biographies of living persons, copyrights, verifiability and notability. A suggested standard is the prior creation of 25 valid articles, not including redirects or disambiguation pages. This user right is not normally given to brand-new editors, regardless of the number of articles created.
If you wish to request Autopatrolled rights for yourself or another user, please see Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Autopatrolled. Administrators do not need to request or add this user right for themselves or other administrators; it is automatically granted as part of the administrator tools package (specifically, the autopatrol
permission).
See also
- An automatically generated list of users with this flag.
- JVbot with its patrol whitelist was the predecessor to this system, before the functionality was built into the MediaWiki software.
- The Village Pump discussion that led to the creation of this usergroup.
- Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Autopatrolled – the place to request Autopatrolled rights for yourself or anyone else.
- {{Autopatrolled topicon}} – a top icon template to indicate you have the autopatrolled user right.
- {{User wikipedia/Autopatrolled}} – a userbox template to indicate you have the autopatrolled user right.
- DBQ-87[dead link] – a database query used to generate candidates for this privilege.
- Wikipedia:Database reports/Editors eligible for Autopatrol privilege — a monthly generated database report that lists users that may be eligible for the autopatrolled user right. This replaces the DBQ-87 report listed above.
- Wikipedia:New pages patrol/patrolled pages