Hey,
I put together a firefox toolbar to help out our editors, if anyone is
interested:
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-wikiHow-Editor%27s-Toolbar
It's pretty basic, but gives a notification when an unpatrolled edit
has been made to a featured article and gives some stats on how many
total unpatrolled edits there are and how many logged in users have
edited in the past 30 minutes. A new talk page message indicator also
lights up when you receive a new talk page message.
So far the results have been promising, vandalism on featured articles
has been short lived, and the backlog of unpatrolled edits has gone
way down from consistently over 500 to less than 25 on average.
I'm not sure if other wikis could benefit from this functionality or
if a more general toolbar could be made out of it, but I thought I'd
pass it along.
Travis