Moderator Tools

Group:	Product
Start:	2021
Team members:	Sam Walton; Jason Sherman; Susana Cardenas Molinar; Dennis Mburugu; Olga Tichonova; Katherine Graessle; Venus Lui; Bonaventura Aditya Perdana;
Backlog:	#moderator-tools-team

The Moderator Tools team is a Wikimedia Foundation product team working on content moderation tool needs.

The team's focus is on improving Wikimedia's content moderation processes, including page protection, deletion, reporting, and recent changes patrolling. Our goals are to ensure that Wikimedia's content is as reliable and trustworthy as possible, by empowering volunteer patrollers and administrators. We tend not to work on topics like user reporting and moderation, which are more within the purview of the Trust and Safety Product team.

Latest Update: We are currently focused on improving Watchlist. Your input is welcomed!

If you would like to receive updates on our work, please sign up to our newsletter!

To help us decide what to work on in the future, please visit the Community Wishlist and submit proposals or vote on focus areas.

Projects

July 2021 - March 2022: Research

In the 2021/22 Annual Plan (July-June) the team focused on design research for the first 9 months (July 2021 - March 2022). We heard from a wide range of editors on the problems they're facing in keeping the content on their projects reliable and trustworthy.

We then published a research report, Content Moderation in Medium-Sized Wikimedia Projects. This report found content moderation on mobile web to be the highest priority issue.

April 2022 - March 2023: Mobile web

We worked on improvements to content moderation on mobile web. This project is scheduled to wrap up in March 2023.

In particular, we made improvements to the overflow menu, and implemented a new mobile design for preferences.

We also collected feedback on new designs for diffs on mobile, though this project was paused.

April - July 2023: PageTriage

In response to the 2022 New Pages Patrol letter, our team spent some time working on Extension:PageTriage. You can read the project updates at Wikipedia:Page Curation/2023 Moderator Tools project.

August 2023 - November 2024: Automoderator

During the 2023-2024 fiscal year we built Automoderator - this automated anti-vandalism software can now be enabled by following the guide at Extension:AutoModerator/Deploying.

October 2024 - February 2025: Nuke

We are working on a short project to make feature enhancements to the Nuke extension. Please see our project page.

November 2024 - March 2025: Recent changes

As part of our efforts to improve existing impactful moderator tooling, we are working on a project for a few months to make improvements to Special:RecentChanges and related workflows.

March 2025 - June 2025: Watchlist

As part of our efforts to improve existing impactful moderator tooling, we are working on a project for a few months to make improvements to Special:Watchlist.

The team

Sam Walton
Senior Product Manager
Jason Sherman
Staff Software Engineer
Susana Cardenas Molinar
Senior Software Engineer
Katherine Graessle
Software Engineer
Dennis Mburugu
Engineering Manager
Olga Tichonova
User Experience Designer
Venus Lui
Product Ambassador (zh.wiki)
Bonaventura Aditya Perdana
Product Ambassador (id.wiki)

Requesting code review

Our team is responsible for the following tools and extensions:

If you have filed a patch in one of these repositories, we will endeavour to provide code review where possible. To request code review explicitly, especially in busier codebases like PageTriage where we might miss your contribution, please add it to the Moderator-Tools-Team board in the 'Code review requests' column, so that we can review it alongside our other priorities.