Help:New filters for edit review/Highlighting function

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“New filters for edit review” includes Highlighting tools that let you use color to emphasize edits of particular interest. Used correctly, the Highlighting functions and techniques described below will help you find what you're looking for more quickly and easily.

To assign or remove highlighting

Click the Highlight results button at the top of the dropdown filter menu. Highlight menus (marked by a highlighter pen icon) will appear next to every filter option. Open the menu for the property you want to emphasize and select a color. The system instantly applies that color to all edit results with that property. At the same time, a tag with the property name and a dot showing the highlight color appears in the Active Filter Display Area.

To cancel the highlighting, click the X in the filter tag, or open the Highlight menu and select the white dot.

Multiple highlights, blended colors

Example of blended colors.

You can apply highlighting to as many properties as you like. You can use the same color on multiple properties or use different colors to distinguish the properties from one another. When a given edit is highlighted by more than one color (because it possesses more than one highlighted property), the system highlights that edit with a blend of the relevant highlight colors. For example, yellow and blue highlights will blend to make green.

In addition to applying a colored background to the edit results themselves, the system also displays colored dots next to all highlighted edits. One dot is shown for each color applied to that edit. These dots will help you to understand what colors make up a color blend.

When experimenting with highlight colors, you may want to take a moment to think about your color scheme. For example, if some of the the properties you’re highlighting are related, pick colors for them that are near one another on the color spectrum, such as orange and red or blue and green. If it’s likely that the highlights you’re assigning will result in color blends, pick colors that mix in a pleasing way. Doing so will make your results more meaningful and easier to understand.

Using highlights without filtering

You can filter for a property and highlight it at the same time, or you can use highlighting independently of the associated filter. To use highlighting independently, simply select a highlight color as above, but don’t check the box for the associated filter. This technique can be quite useful, enabling you to keep your search broad while, at the same time, helping you to pick out specific properties of interest.

Example: A new page patroller might wish to know whether new pages were created by registered or unregistered users. She could set filters for both Page creations and Unregistered, but then she’d see only edits that meet both of those conditions. Alternatively, she could:

  1. filter for Page creations
  2. but simply highlight Unregistered

This allows her to easily spot the pages by unregistered users but to review  pages by registered users at the same time. (The Quality and Intent Filters page provides more guidance on using this technique.)

Highlighting in ‘Group changes by page’ mode

An example of highlighting in "Group changes by page" mode.

The “Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist” preference does just what that name suggests: it displays all the changes to a single page (on a single day) in a group. When multiple changes for a page exist, only a “summary line” for the whole group is shown. To see all the changes, users click a small, right-facing arrow next to the summary line, which expands the list of changes.

Highlighting works a little differently in “group by page” mode. When all items in a group have a consistent highlight color—as in the green group at right—the summary line for the whole group gets that same, consistent color. When items within a group are not consistent, however—as in the blue and yellow group at right—the summary line is gray. Users looking for a particular color of highlight can still tell that the color they seek is in a particular group by looking at the colored dots to the left of the summary line. In the example, these are blue and yellow—one dot for each color represented in the group.

About colors

Set of colors used to highlight recent changes' results.

The highlighting function provides five color options (blue, green, yellow, orange and red). Considering that highlight is an extra layer of information on top of the filtered results, you probably don't need to use more than two colors at a time. However, the five options provided (with common and distinct associated meanings) allows you to clarify the intent of your specific case. For example, it may be more intuitive to highlight vandalism in red and edits by newcomers in blue than the other way around.

The specific shades of each color are based on the Wikimedia color palette, where accessibility considerations have been taken into account when selecting the colors. This results on a reduced palette with enough contrast among colors, which allows them to be blended into new colors and still provides color-blind users a reasonable set of distinct enough colors to choose from.