Moderator Tools/Wikimania

Thank you for your interest in the Moderator Tools project! Here you can find the slides presented at Wikimania along with opportunities to let us know what you think. The session recording can be watched on YouTube.

You can also drop by Building 6 - Floor 3 - Table A (unconference) right after the talk to chat with members of the Moderator Tools team, or ping Sam Walton in Remo at any time.

Content moderation

As part of the research phase of this project we want to hear from as many community members as possible about their experiences of moderating content on Wikimedia projects. Please leave any thoughts, reactions, and questions below.

What content moderation tools or processes are missing on your project?

It would be helpful if the existing processes were accessible from a single dashboard with a few basis workflow options, giving moderators the option to indicate which issues have been dealt with, which require more in-dept involvement of other users, which are being worked on and which (still) require attention (or even: urgent attention). --MarcoSwart (talk) 09:15, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A few things that would be helpful but are missing from Cantonese Wikipedia:
- Automatic discussion archiving bot
- Discussion closure (and archiving and tagging) tools
- (I was going to say Reply-To feature, but I learnt today that it's now live on all WMF wikis!)
Deryck C.^Meta 23:29, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What are the common content moderation tasks which you find the most time consuming?

My answer would be spam, although actually I may spend more time researching for answers to users who made honest mistakes. But the latter could also be considered a contribution by me as a user to the project. --MarcoSwart (talk) 09:07, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A few from Cantonese Wikipedia:
- Speedy deletion - checking copyright, incoming links, and interwiki links
- Template and module deprecation & updates (to align with other wikis) - typically takes hours per template. We have a backlog going back to 2018 but there simply aren't enough volunteers with both advanced privileges and technical competence to handle the queue. (See yue:WP:AFD)
Deryck C.^Meta 16:59, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have experience setting up moderation processes on your Wiki? How did you go about doing this?

I became a moderator on nl.wiktionary in 2017. I gradually developed a daily "patrol run" along 10-15 different Special or Category pages, having to do with (in order of decreasing amount of work involved):
1. spam
2. vandalism
3. frequent mistakes by editors
4. requested removal of pages
--MarcoSwart (talk) 09:04, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A few things from Cantonese Wikipedia:
- Deletion discussion process (yue:WP:AFD)
- Copyright review process (yue:WP:CV)
- Good Article review process (yue:WP:GAN)
  - These three are... a painful amount of wikitext both to set up and to maintain.
- I also set up an automatic good article show-reel rotation system, which uses only MediaWiki features (no bots) to put a different Good Article onto the front page each day (yue:WP:GATD). It took a lot of effort and innovative MediaWiki template juggling to set up (using PAGESINCATEGORY, and #expr liberally), but once it's set up it's smooth to run. Deryck C.^Meta 23:33, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If possible, would you rather work on content moderation on desktop or mobile?

Personally, I do prefer desktop, but to attract new moderators in future having better mobile support might strategically more important to nl.wiktionary. --MarcoSwart (talk) 08:51, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I would love the mobile tools to be improved so I can curate on mobile more easily. Often this takes the form of emergency intervention (deletion, protection) when I receive an urgent Telegram or Twitter message from another trusted volunteer without the relevant technical privileges. I intervene on mobile anyway using Chrome mobile's Request desktop site function and it's frustrating. Deryck C.^Meta 17:01, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Other thoughts & feedback

Please feel free to share any thoughts or questions you have which aren't covered by the questions above.

On nl.wiktionary there is no pressing problem to moderate the content, but I have become the only moderator to look after the project on a daily basis. In time however it would be more healthy if there was a larger group of moderators who could easily collaborate with less and less frequent time consumption to do the job even better. --MarcoSwart (talk) 09:22, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Blue-sky thinking: if we can have a machine-learning algorithm tell us what the typical outcome of a moderation decision will be based on past experience, or even better, something that allows us to tag a discussion as "this should probably become a line on a policy page", aggregate the ideas, and suggest a policy page... There are so many things on yue.wp that are repetitive, there are unwritten conventions, but there is neither automation nor written policy. Deryck C.^Meta 23:35, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]