Help:Administrator's Handbook/Recent changes patrol

The Recent Changes Patrol consists of examining recent edits to the wiki for test edits, blanking of pages, vandalism, and other negative changes. There is a link to "Recent changes" on the sidebar at the left. Any user can use this page and help revert vandalism. However, only sysops can block users and delete bad pages. Thus it is important for sysops to sometimes inspect recent changes and stop persistent spammers and vandals. There is also the patrol tool which gives unmarked edits an exclamation point on the Recent Changes page.

Every recent edit appears in Recent Changes. Thus, if a page is edited twice, both the new edit and previous edit appear. Thus, it is not possible to hide an edit by making another edit.

Types of bad edits

 * Blanking Bots or vandals that delete chunks of pages, apparently at random. These will be obvious in recent changes from the large decrease in the size of a page. However, not all shrinking pages are blank; the page may be turned into a disambiguation page, for example, so do not revert an edit simply because the page shrank.
 * Copyright violations often referred to as "Copyvios" for short -- occur when copyrighted text or files are added to a project. How this is dealt with depends on the type of material that was copied. Text that is copied and pasted from other websites is the most common problem. In many cases, the user who contributed the material will add a link to the source website. Most users are not familiar with how copyright laws apply, so they should be dealt with kindly (but firmly).
 * Creation of new speedy deletion candidates administrators are in a position to delete obvious problematic pages that some users create.
 * Spam Some users like to add spam to wikis, adding lots of links to their own websites so that their search-engine rankings increase. A common tactic of spammers is to use CSS to hide spam so that readers do not see it, but search engines do. However, such spam becomes obvious when editing a page or viewing a diff.

Types of users
There are generally four kinds of users that make edits on the wiki:
 * 1) Brand-new contributors Editors who have their account creation very close to often a large number of contributions. These deserve some special attention because even when they are not doing vandalism, they are not likely to be familiar with policies on Pikmin Fanon or do quite a bit of experimentation. Be extra careful with these people as they are more likely to become regular contributors in the future and are the source of new help for the project. Still, watch carefully for vandalism from these editors or for sockpuppeting, especially if they create a user page as one of their first edits.
 * 2) Frequent contributors They make the most edits. Often, these users are most recognizable as they edit consistently and constantly. Their edits are checked manually, for minor things like spelling errors, anyway.
 * 3) Semi-experienced contributors They usually have names that appear in green, meaning that they have user pages. A user is more likely to check unfrequent contributors than these.
 * 4) Unfrequent contributors Often have names that appear in yellow, because they have no user page. Many of these contributors are new users with good intentions. However, vandals and sockpuppets who want to hide their IP address or use the page-move feature often create these user accounts.