Help:New filters for edit review/Highlighting function

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“New filters for edit review” includes Highlighting tools that let you use colour to emphasise 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.

Highlighting can make search results more meaningful and help you find what you’re looking for more quickly. In this example, the user is searching for Page edits and is particularly interested in edits by new users (here Newcomers in green and Learners in blue).
Clicking the large Highlight results button at the top of the filter panel displays a highlight menus next to each filter. You can use highlighting in combination with a filter or independently. In the example, the user is filtering for May have problems but is using colour independently to identify the most likely problem edits. (The Quality and Intent filters are not available on all wikis—learn more on the Quality and Intent page.)

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 colour. The system instantly applies that colour to all edit results with that property. At the same time, a tag with the property name and a dot showing the highlight colour 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 colours

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

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

When experimenting with highlight colours, you may want to take a moment to think about your colour scheme. For example, if some of the properties you’re highlighting are related, pick colours for them that are near one another on the colour spectrum, such as orange and red or blue and green. If it’s likely that the highlights you’re assigning will result in colour blends, pick colours 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 colour 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:

filter for Page creations
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

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 colour—as in the green group at right—the summary line for the whole group gets that same, consistent colour. 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 colour of highlight can still tell that the colour they seek is in a particular group by looking at the coloured dots to the left of the summary line. In the example, these are blue and yellow—one dot for each colour represented in the group.

About colours

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