This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

This is not about the Hatnote website itself. For the site, see here.

Hatnote: 'Listen to Wikipedia' (often referred to as Hatnote) is a third-party visualization tool that shows recent changes in real time. Editors on standby can revert damaging edits before they reach a larger audience using basic cognitive generalization.

Click here. No installation into your computer is required.

Hatnote only shows mainspace edits; any edits made to talk pages, pages within the Wikipedia namespace etc. will not appear. Each edit is visualized as a 'bubble' that temporarily appears once users publish their changes. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the rapidly appearing bubbles on the screen, so it is usually more efficient to filter through the edits by generalizing types of edits as "likely" or "unlikely" to contain vandalism. Clicking on the bubble will take you to the diff of the article, where it can be easily reverted. It is recommended to have rollback rights to facilitate rollbacks; this will let you catch as many bubbles as possible before they disappear. The attributes of each bubble vary:

The 'mass' or size of the bubble represents the edit in bytes. If an editor only changed a single letter in an article, the bubble will be tiny.

• Green: Edits by IP editors. These, combined with large-sized edits, are statistically very likely to be vandalism (e.g. page or chunk blanking). Do not disregard small green bubbles--they are also likely!
• Purple: Edits by bots in mainspace articles. These bubbles are unlikely to be any sort of vandalism (with the exception of the occasional malfunctions or false positives).
• Gray: Edits by registered users AND temporary accounts, per the change from the IP editors policy (see WP:TEMP). This means that the edit can contain unsourced edits, incorrect information, or somewhat-vandalism that triggers the edit filter. While statistically less likely to be vandalism, it is encouraged to give these a look if you have caught up with the green bubbles.

Hatnote is useful for readily reverting vandalism. but it also must be used with caution. Refrain from speedily warning users that contain simple mistakes, lack sources, or are likely to be in good faith. This is because users frequently make a mistake or an insufficient edit, notice additional changes have to be made, and make those changes in another edit. For example:

• NewUser123 has just made an edit that has a mistyped number. NewUser123 notices the mistake, realizes it should be probably be fixed,
• ExperiencedUser123 notices the edit on Hatnote and determines it to be vandalism for publishing incorrect information. ExperiencedUser123 proceeds to revert the edit and post a warning message on NewUser123's talk page for vandalism.
• Meanwhile NewUser123 is editing the article to fix the mistake. NewUser123 then finds his original edit reverted and a warning on his talk page.

A banner will display upon the registration of a new user:

Feel free to welcome those users; the tool can also be used to keep track of potential socks that may lead to WP:SPI.