Patrol
Patrolling is Wikipedia's quality-control mechanism: experienced editors review new edits and pages to catch vandalism, errors, and policy violations. This page tracks patrol volume, reviewer concentration, response times, and coverage signals: an informative, still-evolving view of the community's immune system.
Patrol metrics on this page are currently informative and under active work. Historical patrol logging, autopatrol-right inference, and revision matching are not fully consistent across periods and Wikipedias yet, so treat the charts as directional rather than definitive.
Monthly Patrol Volume
Number of edits reviewed (patrolled) each month. Declining patrol volume against stable edit counts signals a growing review backlog.
How is this calculated?
Each bar is the count of log_type=patrol events from the MediaWiki logging dump for that period. This includes manual patrols only; autopatrol logging was disabled by Wikimedia in 2018.
Patrol Coverage
Patrol coverage is the percentage of revisions that appear to have been reviewed. The solid line shows manual patrols only. The dashed line shows an adjusted coverage estimate, including edits by users with the autopatrol right, whose edits are automatically marked as patrolled but not logged.
How is this calculated?
Manual Coverage = patrolled revisions / total revisions × 100%
Adjusted Coverage Estimate = (patrolled + autopatrolled) / total revisions × 100%
A revision is "patrolled" if its revision_id appears as current_revision_id in the patrol log. "Autopatrolled" revisions are estimated by identifying edits made by users who held an autopatrol-granting group at the time of the edit, based on the user rights change log and current site configuration. That estimate is useful, but still being refined because the underlying logging and rights history are not perfectly consistent across periods.
Patrol Latency
Patrol latency measures how quickly edits get reviewed: the time between when an edit is made and when a patroller marks it. The dashed line shows the P90 (worst-case for 90% of edits).
How is this calculated?
Latency = patrol_timestamp − revision_timestamp
For each patrol event, the corresponding revision's creation time is looked up and the difference computed. Median and 90th percentile are computed per wiki and month. Only events with a matched revision and latency under 1 year are included. When multiple wikis or months are combined, these summaries are weighted by patrol volume; they are portfolio summaries rather than a pooled event-level percentile.
Patroller Fragility
How many patrollers would need to leave before 50% of patrol work goes undone? Lower = more fragile. This measures concentration of the patrol workforce.
How is this calculated?
Fragility = min k where top-k patrollers' patrols ≥ 50% × Total Patrols
Fragility Ratio = Fragility / Unique Patrollers × 100%
Patrollers are ranked by patrol count descending. The fragility index is the minimum number whose cumulative patrols reach 50% of the total.
New Pages vs. Diff Patrols
Patrol work breaks down into two types: reviewing new pages (is this page legitimate?) and reviewing diffs to existing pages (is this edit constructive?).