How does the patrolling system work?

What a great question! Let me give you a brief overview of why patrolling is needed, and what it does.

We're opening up our guide content in an interesting place: we already have thousands of extremely high-quality, step-by-step guides that have been used by millions of people to fix their hardware. But the guides iFixit has written are very narrowly focused.

It's important that it be super easy to contribute repair guides for new kinds of things, and make modifications to them. That's why Wikipedia works so well— they accept any and all edits, and then filter them after the fact.

The problem is that these two goals: protecting high-quality existing content and encouraging laissez-faire contributions are diametrically opposed.

Patrolling is the solution. Let's say Betty wants to make a change to the iPhone 3G Display guide. She can click edit, make any change she likes, and save it. Then when the next person goes to view that guide, there's a link at the top that lets you view the latest version including 'Unverified edits'. At the same time, her changes are added to /Patrol (this page is linked from /Contribute). Experienced users (or admins) can then come along and 'patrol' Betty's proposed changes, approving and denying them as appropriate.

This works really well. Betty is empowered to make modifications to high quality content, but people using the repair manual don't see her changes until they have been reviewed by an expert. We have approved dozens and dozens of edits to our repair guides since we opened our manuals up to editing. We all make mistakes, and having thousands of eyeballs helps a ton. (I'm a little embarrassed at some of the edits I've approved to fix blatant typos that have been on iFixit for five years. The new system is clearly better than our old way of doing things.)

But wait, you say! If you have to patrol every edit, doesn't that put a huge barrier in front of getting new repair content into the system? Doesn't that fly in the face of the free and open culture that makes Wikipedia work so well? Why yes, it does. That's where our reputation system comes in.

Every document on iFixit (guides, wikis, everything) has a reputation threshold. This defaults to 0 on new content, and is set high (10,000 or so) on iFixit-authored repair manuals. If you are editing a document and your reputation is higher than the document's reputation threshold, your edit is approved automatically— no patrolling required. If it's less, it goes into the patrol queue.

Simple! If you're an expert, your edits are immediately approved. If you're not, contribute all you want, trusting that your changes will be reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing. Knowing this review will happen is actually empowering, because many people are intimidated about modifying a repair manual because they know they're not an expert.