Extension:Nuke/2024 Moderator Tools project

As part of the WE1.3 Key Result (Increase user satisfaction of 4 moderation products by 5pp each), the Wikimedia Foundation's Moderator Tools team is embarking on a project to make improvements to the Nuke extension. Nuke is used by administrators to mass-delete pages created by another user, or matching a title pattern, saving time which would otherwise need to be spent on manual page-by-page deletions. It has received relatively little attention over the years, and a substantial number of feature requests have accrued. During interviews with administrators at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 we found that there was scope for improving the tool and increasing administrator satisfaction.

With this project we are experimenting with contracting a volunteer developer to expand our team's capacity for a short-term project. We are hoping that this model will help us provide support for tools that we might otherwise not prioritise, while working more seamlessly with developers who are already familiar with Wikimedia technologies.

This project may include the following work:

Enabling nuking of temporary accounts used by an IP (T342785)
Finalising the extension’s migration to Codex (T364146)
Enabling the deletion of pages older than 30 days (T33858)
Adding additional logging to track and understand Nuke usage (T366068)
Enabling deleting associated talk pages (T95797)
Enabling also deleting subpages (T46318) or redirects (T364222)
Miscellaneous quality of life features (e.g. T364224, T364225, T364223)

Please let us know on the talk page if you have other frustrations with or feature requests for the Nuke extension. We would be interested in meeting with administrators to talk about their experiences using Nuke - please let us know if you'd be interested in chatting with one of our team members over a quick call.

Design mockups

To enable us to include more information about each page to be deleted in a comprehensible manner, we are exploring designs which replace the list of page links with a table, in which we could add additional columns.

Showing some information about the pages in the table.
Showing table with additional information about the pages.

If you would like to give your feedback about these designs please visit the short survey here.

Usability testing

The goal of the usability testing was to gather feedback from a variety of admins to help improve functionality and UI of the extension. In person usability testing was conducted at the Hackathon and Wikimania. Additionally, feedback was gathered through Discord, Phabricator, and user interviews (moderated & unmoderated).

Participants were administrators and experienced editors from various languages (de, en, pl, tr, uk) Wikipedias, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, who use the extension.

Summary of key results

Admins requested additional filters/changes to the filtering page:

Filter by page size, url, characters, IP range, date of creation, exit file, and strings. The ability to select multiple namespaces filter and increase the day limit eg. 90-180 days, 365 days.
Delete associated redirects & talk pages
View and have access to number of editor, number of edits, view page histories, author and source, block the editor. Additionally, have better deletion reasons eg. similar to single page deletion.

Project updates

Updates on the project will be posted here.

December 2024 - This project started in November, and we have been working on a few different aspects of Nuke. The first is improvements to the deletion confirmation screen. Relevant links for the user whose pages were deleted are now shown after page deletions are queued, along with links to the pages that were not selected for deletion, in case the deleting administrator has followup tasks to perform. We also enabled users to select multiple namespaces in a single filter, rather than being required to select just one. Additionally, we are working on increasing the length of time in which pages can be Nuked from 30 days to higher values (T380846), and exploring different form layouts to improve the clarity of navigation (T380297).
October 2024 - We completed work to support acting on all temporary accounts used by an IP address (T342785) and enabled tagging of Nuke page deletions (T366068).