Wikipedia page monitoring

What does page monitoring involve?

Page monitoring means an experienced editor keeps your article, its talk page and any related pages under watch, reads each change as it appears, and decides whether it needs a response. Wikipedia's watchlist feature is the basic tool. It lists recent changes to watched pages, and it is private: no other user, administrators included, can see what is on it.

The watching is the easy part. The work is in reading each change against policy. An edit that looks hostile may be a reasonable change from a good-faith editor. An edit that looks minor may remove the one citation holding a paragraph in place. Monitoring is useful only if someone can tell the difference and knows which response Wikipedia permits for each.

What do we watch for, and how do we usually respond?

Deletion nominations are the time-sensitive item. Articles for Deletion gives a nomination at least seven days of discussion, and a proposed deletion notice runs for the same minimum, so a nomination noticed late leaves little time to respond well.

What can be reverted, and what cannot?

Less than most people expect. Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline allows connected editors to make only unambiguously uncontroversial edits directly. Those include removing spam and unambiguous vandalism, and removing unambiguous violations of the policy on biographies of living persons. Almost everything else should be proposed on the talk page.

The definition of vandalism matters here. Wikipedia defines it as editing deliberately intended to obstruct the encyclopedia's purpose, and says that good-faith edits are not vandalism even when misguided. Edit warring is not vandalism either, and neither is adding material that breaches the neutrality policy. So an editor who adds a sourced but one-sided paragraph has started a content dispute, and reverting it means taking a side in that dispute.

How do we respond to everything else?

Through the channel that fits the problem.

• Edit requests on the talk page, for factual corrections, balance and restoring sourced material. See our updates and editing service.
• Talk-page discussion, when another editor's change needs to be questioned rather than simply reversed.
• The biographies of living persons noticeboard, when a dispute turns on that policy and the talk page has not resolved it.
• Requests for page protection, when disruption is persistent. Administrators decide, and the protection policy says pages should not be protected solely as a pre-emptive measure.
• Deletion discussions, where we set out the sourced case for the article. That work falls under page repair.

Where a disagreement continues, it moves into our dispute support service and Wikipedia's formal dispute resolution steps.

How are alerts and the response plan agreed?

At the start, in writing. Before monitoring begins we agree a short plan that sets out:

1. who should be told about changes, and how;
2. which events justify an immediate alert, such as a deletion nomination or an unsourced claim about a living person, and which can wait for a regular summary;
3. what we will do without asking first, which is limited to reverting obvious vandalism and removing unambiguous violations of the policy on living people;
4. what needs your agreement, such as the wording of any edit request or talk-page post;
5. what you and your colleagues should not do, which includes editing the article directly or asking anyone else to.

The last point matters as much as the rest. A careful response from us can be undone in an afternoon by a well-meaning colleague who edits the page directly.

What will we not do?

• Treat the article as ours to control. Wikipedia's ownership policy says no one owns an article, and its subject has no right to dictate what it says.
• Revert good-faith edits or take sides in a content dispute by editing the article.
• Protect the page. Only administrators can apply protection, and we can only ask.
• Remove sourced material because it is unwelcome, or suggest that monitoring can keep criticism off the page.

Could you watch the page yourself?

Yes, and for a quiet article it may be enough. Any registered account can add a page to its watchlist, choose to watch it temporarily for a period between a week and a year, and turn on email notification of changes in its preferences.

What a watchlist does not provide is judgement. The difficult calls in monitoring are whether an edit is vandalism or a content dispute, whether a claim is an unambiguous policy violation, and which venue fits when neither applies. A subject who gets those calls wrong, typically by reverting a critical edit, starts an edit war under their own name, and the reverts sit in the article's history for every later editor to read. Knowing when not to act is most of the skill.

How do you start?

Start with a free page health check, usually within two working days, so that monitoring begins from a clear view of the article's current state, tags and history. Then contact us through the contact form to agree the response plan; you will hear back the next working day at the latest.