Help:New filters for edit review/Highlighting function

“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  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


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 ' and ', but then she’d see only edits that meet both of those conditions. Alternatively, she could:
 * 1) filter for 
 * 2) but simply highlight 

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 Q&I>Help:New filters for edit review/Quality and Intent Filters#Get the best of both worlds .28with highlighting.29|more guidance on using this technique.)

Problems with "Enhanced Recent Changes"
Highlighting works only partially with Help>Help:Enhanced recent changes|Enhanced Recent Changes. This preference, also called “”, does just what that name suggests: it displays all the changes to a single page in a group, instead of chronologically. When multiple changes for a page exist, only a summary line is shown. To see all the changes, users click a small, right-facing arrow, which expands the list of changes.

Since a single group of changes might include highlights of multiple colors, the summary lines are not highlighted. To see highlighting for a group, you must expand it. Various solutions to this have been considered<tvar|T159896> </>, but in the meanwhile the only way to get the full benefit of highlighting is to turn this option off on the Recent Changes Preferences page.

About colors
[[File:New filters for edit review - Highlighting - colors.png|thumb|

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.