Moderator Tools/Newsletter/2

Welcome to issue #2 of the Moderator Tools newsletter! It's been about a year since the first one (sorry for the delay), but we're excited to tell you what our team has been working on since then, and where you can guide our ongoing and upcoming work.

Automoderator

Automoderator is now feature-complete for its initial release! Automoderator is a highly configurable automated anti-vandalism tool which reverts edits that a machine learning model determines to be vandalism. It can be enabled, disabled, and configured at any time by administrators via a Community Configuration form. Automoderator is now in use on Indonesian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, with other projects at various stages of discussion and setup. You can track data about Automoderator's activity so far via a Superset dashboard.

To request Automoderator on your Wikimedia project, please refer to the deployment steps.

Although we are wrapping up our focused time developing Automoderator while we review real-world data and feedback about its impact, we do have a couple of other features that we hope to work on in the background - support for small Wikimedia projects with few/no administrators (T372280), and integrating the multilingual revert risk model, which we believe will have increased accuracy and coverage on the wikis which it supports. For the new model, we're looking for support testing the model to better understand its behaviour - please check out the testing process and review some edits!

Nuke

During the 2024-2025 Wikimedia Foundation fiscal year, our team wants to make improvements to the software that moderators (patrollers, administrators, stewards, etc.) are using today. Although it's valuable to build new features, it's also important that we continue maintaining the important tools that are already in use to maintain and improve Wikipedia's quality.

One such project, which we plan to work on between November 2024 and February 2025, is to improve the Nuke extension. We have contracted a community developer, Chlod, who has worked on the extension in the past, to help us with this! It can be hard for the Moderator Tools team to work on many smaller projects, so we're trialling bringing developers on for short-term contracts to help us expand our coverage. With the Nuke project, we hope to make a number of improvements, including additional filters, increasing the deletion time range, automated deletion of related pages, and bug fixes.

Read more about this project, and provide feedback, at Extension:Nuke/2024 Moderator Tools project.

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. We will be prioritizing work for this project on an ongoing basis, but have some larger projects that we will solicit input for via our project page.

We have a brief survey at Moderator Tools/Survey:Recent Changes to gather input for this project - please answer the questions if you're interested.

Task prioritization

Finally, looking to the future, we plan to research and work on tasks identified as part of the Community Wishlist focus area titled 'task prioritization'. We'll be looking for opportunities to speak with editors about how they decide what needs their attention, and in particular will be investigating the Watchlist to see where we might be able to make usability and feature improvements. If you have thoughts about opportunities in this focus area please share them on the task prioritization talk page, or file a new wish!

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.