Talk:Moderator Tools

Hi, I had an idea about something that might target the problem of edit warring. It's discussed here in the idea lab, and could have various use cases, although I think the best is regarding edit warring.

In my mind this works really well but I'm very new and am unsure of the wider implications or the resources required. So users are encouraged to use proposed edits when making an edit that is controversial or likely to be controversial. As of now, an editor notices a perceived injustice and makes an edit, which may be biased or worded badly due to their own personal bias, but nevertheless a progression; the editor has achieved their goal of getting the change published. Another editor strongly objects to this edit, due to its bad wording or content, and this second editor reverts it; i.e. a regression, with the second editor furthering their goal, possibly in defence of quality control. This frustrates the initial editor as they had already achieved their objective, and the regression antagonizes them, and they try to force it back the way it was. It's this tug of war--facilitated by the binary of published and unpublished--that creates edit wars. Proposed edits make the entire journey one constant progression and counter the binary nature of publishing (which sometimes facilitates "us vs them" conflict), provided the reverter collaborates, and the initial editor is familiar with the various dispute resolutions like 3O and RfCs.

I don't know if that's an accurate description of the nature of edit warring. I can only speak from minimal experience. I think 'proposed edits' could make Wikipedia less combative and possibly generate more constructive discussion, but it might have a limited effect. I would be interested in hearing editors' thoughts and other ideas/plans/actions regarding this problem. Thank you for reading.

Hi - thanks for making the suggestion, I found it interesting to read the Idea Lab discussion and the pros and cons discussed there. Although we don't have any plans to work on a feature like this in the near future I'll keep it in mind as we figure out our team's priorities :)

Thanks for taking the time to read it, have a good day!

Welcome to the inaugural Moderator Tools newsletter! We’ll aim to publish new issues whenever we have big new updates about the projects we’re working on.

PageTriage

PageTriage NewPagesFeed - October 2023

We’ve now wrapped up our work to support the English Wikipedia’s New Pages Patrol community by tackling some major technical debt in the PageTriage extension. The final project update gives an overview of all the work that we did over the past 6 months.

Automoderator

We’re currently working on a project called Automoderator, which will enable communities to automatically revert bad edits based on community-defined settings. We’re looking for input and feedback on our plans so far, and have a number of questions on topics we need patrollers and administrators to help us understand better. In addition to the overview and questions on the main project page, we now have two sub-pages with more specific information:

Automoderator - model testing tool screenshot

• If you want to investigate Automoderator’s accuracy rate and check out how it would behave in practice, we’ve set up a testing process with data and scores so you can help us find new patterns we can take into consideration before Automoderator is deployed.
• The measurement plan is the first draft of our plan to measure whether Automoderator is achieving its goals and not having negative consequences. Want to propose some data for us to capture to help evaluate this project? This is the place to go!

Other

Our team has also been working to ensure that software we’re responsible for is updated to support temporary accounts. We’ve made changes to PageTriage, Nuke, and The Wikipedia Library.

Although we have active engineering projects ongoing, we're always happy to chat about your community's content moderation tool needs - feel free to get in contact at Talk:Moderator Tools.

Read past issues or sign up to this newsletter here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:21, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Please share what tools or processes you need but haven't been able to establish. What do you think our team should work on?

What do you do regularly that you wish was easier or less time consuming?

We're curious about processes like discussing articles for deletion and reporting content for review. How did you establish these as processes in your community?

I've just posted a progress update at Moderator Tools/December update, summarising some of the key points we've learned from our research so far. I'd love to hear if this resonates with you, or if there's anything else you think we should be considering or adding to this.

Pinging folks who have engaged with us on MediaWiki @Nick Moyes @Deryck Chan @MarcoSwart :)

Thanks for the update!

Just arrived here from a link at the 2021 Wikimania conference programme, and it struck me that there's nowhere there, or here, that gives any examples of the size range of Wikimedia projects which fall within and outside the term 'medium-sized'. I'm sure many people would find that clarification helpful? ~~~~

Great question! This is something we're currently discussing, because we're not sure where the boundaries are just yet. We want to focus our research on projects which are currently growing in size, where perhaps the active editor community is feeling overwhelmed by the content moderation workload they're now having to contend with. In that sense we're not so interested in the biggest Wikis like English or German, where there is already a myriad of moderation tooling and processes in place (granted, much of it community maintained or a mess of hard-to-find templates). We've also ruled out the smallest projects where Global Sysops and the Small Wiki Monitoring Team are the ones doing most of the moderation.

This leaves us with an as-yet vaguely defined region in the middle. We're digging into some data over the coming weeks to try to put some focus on that, at which point I might be able to provide some more concrete numbers about the kinds of projects we're focusing on.

Regardless of that, we are still interested in hearing from anyone with something to say on the topic :)