Talk:Moderator Tools/Content moderation on mobile web/Diff

We have decided to pause this redesign project for the foreseeable future.

This decision didn't come lightly, as we'd already spent a substantial amount of effort exploring and designing what we've shown on the project page so far. During this year's annual planning process at the Wikimedia Foundation we decided to prioritise other projects - ones which will more directly impact the patrollers and administrators contributing to Wikimedia projects today. This project was taking a longer-term view, aiming to grow the number of mobile-first experienced editors over time, and doesn't fit with this changing priority.

This isn't to say that this redesign will never happen - we will continue evaluating its priority next to our other work streams, and may find time to work on it in the future. We would also like to prioritise a much smaller project - simply adding an Undo button to the existing diff interface - so I may have further updates on that over the coming months.

Thank you to everyone who has provided input into the project so far. In the meantime, we're exploring the idea of automoderation.

The line With Advanced Mobile Contributions (AMC)…… is excluded from translation target. Kindly push it for translation please. Cheers,

Thanks for catching that - I've added the missing tags.

Thank you for very timely action, and my bad, one more push pls? Section at ==== In-line diffs ==== and sentence: Screen sizes have, on average,……. So sorry you have to come back /:

We've just added some new designs proposing an option for how we could display Tags (e.g. "Mobile edit", "Reverted") and Flags (e.g. Minor edit, Bot). We also added a design showing dropdown behaviour for longer edit summaries.

Thanks for highlighting this as something that was missing from our earlier designs @The wub - what do you think about this placement and behaviour?

Given that Minor and Mobile edits both have (M) as a shorthand, either a new naming is needed or Minor edit flag could be dropped. Minor edits are useful as a mechanism for filtering, but also rather useless as a feature in general since bad faith editors might abuse minor edits to evade scrutiny, so for patrollers they need to monitor all edits regardless.

On other hand, understanding an edit is mobile can help someone else understand the technical/useflow of the edit creator, and Reverts are useful too, as well as Bot edits. I think the truncating long edit messages and making it available in preview works well.

@Shushugah Where do you see (M) as a shorthand for Mobile edits? As I understand it mobile edits show up as a Tag, whereas minor edits are denoted by the M symbol. Is that wrong, or not true on all wikis?

I didn't see anything specifically incorrect, I just wasn't sure what M stood for when I see/saw it, and it's just ambiguous until it is not. Even the distinction between tag and flag is not something editors like myself really make a distinction of

Oh I see, that makes sense, thanks - we'll think about this.

@MdsShakil @Ladsgroup @The wub We've posted potential designs for this work on the project page - please let us know what you think!

These mockups look good to me, and I think the new designs are clearer. Especially like having a link back to the history. I prefer having the user details collapsed by default, but could we include the user's edit count there too? It's nice that admins will have access to change the visibility of revisions.

One request: can we add tags to the edit summary as well? phab:T298174

@Samwalton9 (WMF) LGTM, I agree with The WUB.

The design looks good but:

• It is confusing admins with users who have rollbacker right, rollbackers should also see the new design.
• Rollback should be the first option for admins/rollbackers. I use that waaaaay more than I use revert.

@The wub We weren't sure of the value of displaying edit count in the current diff UI, but we can absolutely explore adding that back in to the new designs. And yes, tags definitely need to be added, we keep talking about them but not being too sure where to add them, perhaps in the Edit summary section? Do you think they should be visible all the time, or perhaps behind a click?

@Ladsgroup We used admin/non-admin as a shorthand for showing basic features vs all features; Rollback visibility would definitely be visible based on the project's user rights. Interesting - I wondered about Rollback as a 'main' button too. I'll have a think about what we could do with that. I'm concerned three buttons in the tray might make it a bit full, or require us to go to two rows, and swapping Undo and Rollback might be confusing. Ideas welcome!

Three buttons is not that bad specially given that it's going to be for smaller set of users. But if I have to pick one of these two buttons, I'd go with rollback instead of undo and leave the undo to the menu (basically swapping rollback and undo buttons in the designs).

@Samwalton9 (WMF) I just felt that if we have the edit count available, it might fit well in "user details" otherwise that section is only links to other places rather than actual details. Personally it's not something I rely on too much, but maybe other people would miss it.

Tags should be always visible I think, since they can be in a small font and don't take too much space. Along with the edit summary makes sense.

And I think I agree with Ladsgroup that rollback should be the visible button when it's available. As on desktop diffs it should also indicate when more than just the current edit would be rolled back using MediaWiki:Rollbacklinkcount.

I am glad the silly byte count was removed, but I agree within the user detail, keeping the contributor count is important. When I see someone with lower edit count, I try to take extra care to avoid wiki slang/jargon in my edit message.

I do think more main buttons for admin/roll backers would not be excessive, given their proficiency in editing but on other hand, how often would blocking or rolling back be done on mobile anyways? If it takes one extra click, and prevents accidents, that’s not bad. Shushugah (talk) 17:51, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing @Shushugah! Do you find the user groups list helpful too, or do you primarily use the edit count?

@Samwalton9 (WMF) I'm not opposed to user groups (would you show ALL user groups even?) but in most cases, edit count (oh boy, we're getting political about editcountitus) is a reasonably proxy substitute and more detailed. For example, someone with 500+ edits is almost always ECP, although someone could have an alt/new account with fewer than 500 edits and still be granted ECP, but that's an edge case. Knowing someone is a rollbacker, admin, etc..isn't relevant or shouldn't be, when determining consensus. That's a risk in itself, that user groups give impression that some editors are "super"/more preferred editors, but still I think edit count can give a slightly more accessible playing field than hat collecting does.

Ironically knowing someone makes 500,000 edits tells me more about their edit habits (gnome/bot/automated) versus someone making several thousands. Both are valuable contributors (assuming no abuse of course).

The Age of account can be useful combination too. Someone making 400 edits in one month, is different for me, than someone making 300 edits across 3 years. Although my account is good example where I made 3 edits in 2015-2017 and then 500 edits in month of 2018.

To conclude, I am fine with including everything, but if you wanted succinct descriptions, I'd include/prioritize edit count (within the detailed description, and leaning towards omitting user group info)

I think things have already come up here, yet I'm referring to them.

While editing with a mobile device, I felt that it would have been more convenient to contribute if there was a link to the article's history, rollback and undo button on the mobile diff page. Thank you

Thank you for working on this. I highly appreciate addressing long-standing issues and giving much needed support to our patrollers. My thinking is that this is just a button. The added-value of the button is so massive it justifies ignoring the details and making further improvements incrementally later on. I know I generally have a JFDI attitude but have you considered just doing it 😅?

I have one small annoyance for mobile diffs and it's when people post links to mobile diffs in Wikipedia and I'm mostly using Wikipedia in desktop, I have to remove .m. domain and also change Special:MobileDiff/ to Special:Diff/ so I can actually use the diff to my known workflow. But again this minor annoyance is nothing compared to not having an undo button in diff in mobile.

I suggest showing to people who have rollback rights (and add rollback button instead of undo). That way newcomers won't abuse this feature right away.

I totally agree that it's a minor change, and we might just start by adding the button to the existing MobileDiff page before we figure out a more comprehensive redesign of diffs.

For context though, these open questions and explorations are happening while our team's engineers are working on Preferences, so they're not holding up just doing it. We're just starting to collect information and input before it's lined up to actually get worked on!

Makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

Diffs

• I think the in-line diff is more suited to mobile screens, although the ability to switch between them would be great.
• There are visual diffs too, although I'm not sure what the status of that project is and whether they are ever planned to graduate from a Beta Feature. I do like them, and prefer the colours they use to the current mobile diffs.
• Mobile diffs are currently missing the useful change tags (phab:T298174)

Undo/rollback

• I usually undo entire edits. Occasionally make "partial reverts" but it's not that common.
  • Might it be possible to gather data on how often "partial reverts" are made?
• To be honest I rarely undo or rollback edits when on mobile. If the option was available from the diff page (like "Thank" is) then I would certainly use it more
• Another annoyance is how prominent the rollback links are in the mobile watchlist, to the extent that English Wikipedia has a gadget specifically to add a confirmation step . It's rare to want to rollback without at least looking at the diff, so having the option on the diff page might mean the Watchlist ones could be removed or at least de-emphasised

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

In terms of partial reverts we looked at some data and found that only 3% of reverts (edits which take an article back to an earlier state) were partial reverts, with the rest being full reverts. Do you have any concerns about making it easier to perform full reverts from a vandalism perspective? i.e. are vandals likely to make more use of this and therefore generate additional workload for patrollers?

Hmm, that's a good point about possible downsides of making it easier. Not just for vandals, but for misguided good faith editors as well: if you get a notification that your edit was reverted, which links directly to the diff page, it could be quite tempting just to click the Undo button there. Maybe the feature should only show up for autoconfirmed users? Or not show up on diffs that are themselves undos, as a way to discourage edit warring?