Moderator Tools/Content Moderation in Medium-Sized Wikimedia Projects/ta

2021/22-இல், நடுத்தர அளவுடைய விக்கிமீடியா செயல்திட்டங்களில் உள்ளடக்க கட்டுப்பாட்டாளர்களின் தேவைகளைப் புரிந்துகொள்ள குழு ஆராய்ச்சி மேற்கொண்டு வருகின்றது. இந்தப் பக்கம் இறுதி அறிக்கையில் இடம்பெற்றுள்ள முடிவுகள் மற்றும் பரிந்துரைகளின் சுருக்கத் தொகுப்பைக் கொண்டுள்ளது, நீங்கள் இதை முழுமையாக இல் படிக்கலாம்.

இந்த அறிக்கையில், ‘உள்ளடக்க கட்டுப்பாடு’ என நாங்கள் குறிப்பிடும்போது, ஒரு விக்கிமீடியா செயல்திட்டத்தின் உள்ளடக்கத்தைக் கட்டுப்படுத்துகின்ற கொள்கைகள் மற்றும் செயல்முறைகளைக் குறிப்பிடுகிறோமே தவிர, உள்ளடக்கத்துக்கான நேரடிப் பங்களிப்புகளைக் குறிப்பிடுவதில்லை. இது புதிய திருத்தங்களை ரோந்திடுவது, பக்கங்களை நீக்க அல்லது பாதுகாக்க நிர்வாகி கருவிகளைப் பயன்படுத்துவது, எழுதுதல் கொள்கைகள் மற்றும் குறியிடுதல் பணிகளை வகைப்படுத்துதல் மற்றும் பராமரித்தல் போன்ற செயல்முறைகள் இதில் அடங்கும்.

கீழே கொடுக்கப்பட்டுள்ள முடிவுகள் உங்கள் தேவைகளுடனும், விக்கிமீடியா செயல்திட்டத்தில் உங்கள் சூழ்நிலையுடனும் பொருந்துகின்றதா, இல்லையா? நாம் என்ன தொழில்நுட்பத் திட்டங்களில் வேலை செய்ய வேண்டும் என்பதைப் பற்றிய நமது புரிதலை நாம் தொடர்ந்து வளர்த்துக்கொள்ள பேச்சுப் பக்கத்தில் நாம் அதைத் தெரிந்துகொள்ளலாம்.

எங்களுடைய முதலாவது சுற்று ஆராய்ச்சியிலிருந்து மொபைல் இணையத்தின் உள்ளடக்கக் கட்டுப்பாடு உள்ளடக்க கட்டுப்பாட்டாளர்களின் பிரதானப் பிரச்சனையாக விளங்குவதை நாங்கள் கண்டறிந்துள்ளோம். அடுத்து வரும் மாதங்களில் மொபைல் இணைய இடைமுகத்தில் மேம்பாடுகளை மேற்கொள்வதற்கான வேலையைத் தொடங்குவதை நாங்கள் இலக்காகக் கொண்டுள்ளோம். Please see Content moderation on mobile web for information and questions we have about potential improvements to mobile web.

Research and interviews
This research focused on "medium-sized" Wikimedia projects. We primarily interviewed editors from projects which were not in the top ~10 by size, with a specific focus on understanding content moderation on the Tamil and Ukrainian Wikipedia projects. Our interviewees were predominantly administrators on at least one project, though we also spoke to patrollers, stewards, and tool developers.

While we hope to ultimately work on products which solve needs for a wide range of community members, we wanted to focus on underserved communities when defining our overall direction, as these tend to not have received product investment in the past and have fewer technical volunteers to fill the gaps.

Major technical obstacles
One very obvious theme was that no content moderators we interviewed carried out moderation tasks on mobile. Even on Tamil Wikipedia, with a high percentage of mobile web pageviews (87%) and mobile editors (45.2%), none of the administrators we spoke to regularly edited on mobile. The reason why was very clear: moderation on mobile is so poor as to be practically unusable. It lacks many of the most basic features available via the desktop interface, such as undoing edits from a diff, and even when those features are present they are generally not optimized for mobile. This poses an accessibility and equity issue for communities where smartphones are the most common computing device, or in areas where access to desktops and laptops is intermittent or unreliable due to emergencies or crises.

Additionally, moderation tools are rarely well documented and are difficult to discover. Engaging with processes like maintenance tagging and nominating an article for deletion are obscure, and usually take multiple steps to engage with. Some features requested by our interviewees were already provided by tools such as the Title Blacklist and Abuse Filter. This suggests that these tools are either not widely available, or their functions are not well documented enough for administrators to learn how to use them on their own. On top of this, some of these tools are very powerful and therefore have the potential to cause tremendous accidental harm. This may discourage adoption by new administrators due to high perceived risk and a lack of opportunities to safely learn how to use them.

Major social hurdles
Nearly every respondent in our report noted that administrators on their project felt overworked and understaffed. They pointed to strict requirements for gaining adminship as one major barrier to finding new admins. Additionally, our interviewees from Ukrainian Wikipedia also highlighted the difficulty of onboarding new administrators. Administrators gain a large range of impactful tools, but little guidance on how best to leverage them. This leads to hesitancy both for potential administrator candidates and for the wider community voting on new administrators.

Another theme was how invisible many content moderation tasks are, which leads to the feeling that performing them is less rewarding. Implicit in this was the point that the invisibility of most administration work may also contribute to difficulty in encouraging editors to think about performing moderator work themselves. This is also a problem for administrators seeking to review their own work, or for anyone trying to monitor administrator actions, since getting data on administrative actions is theoretically possible but difficult in practice right now. Therefore, it is hard for anyone to know what kinds of actions are most common, and to assess their impact.

Categorizing moderation capacity by wiki
Content moderator needs vary by project size, and a small admin pool does not automatically mean that a community is understaffed. Therefore, categorizing wikis by administrative capacity is more complex than merely counting the size of their administrator user group or even looking at the number of edits made per month. The metrics we settled on included comparing the monthly active administrator to monthly active editor ratio to the number of edits per month, as well as undertaking a review of a wiki’s policies in a few common areas. Common content moderation policies include:


 * Speedy deletion
 * Deletion discussions
 * Administrator election and removal procedures

We determined that most smaller wikis either have no stated policies on content moderation topics (even if they are carrying out actions such as page deletion), or copy them verbatim from larger wikis. Developing the capacity needed to tailor such policies (both in terms of adapting policy as well as translating it to the language of the wiki) to their specific wiki may therefore be taken as a signal of growing moderation capacity.

In addition to this, we also looked at other characteristics such as percentage of majority-mobile editors, article count of the wiki, and the geographic and linguistic coverage of the project. We wanted to avoid selecting partner wikis that were culturally similar since borrowing policy from closely-related wikis (by language or culture) is a common practice, and we wanted to compare two different moderation contexts for this report.

Product recommendations
Our primary product recommendation would be to improve content moderation from mobile web. We arrived at this conclusion from our main finding that moderation on mobile is practically impossible even for very basic tasks. It poses a barrier to participation for new administrators, as well as addressing an equity issue for many growing communities. One in four contributors to Wikimedia projects edits primarily from a mobile device, a figure which increases to 40-60% in some emerging markets. These are editors who cannot meaningfully participate in advanced editing or moderation due to their lack of access to laptop or desktop devices. Even for moderators whose primary device is not a smartphone, they are common as secondary computing devices and therefore an improvement to mobile moderation would benefit desktop-first editors as well.

Our aim would be to bring content moderation functionality in the mobile skin up to parity with the desktop editing experience. We would do so by building on the Advanced Mobile Contributions project, and incorporating these features into the default experience - with improved user interfaces where needed - rather than requiring editors to opt-in to an advanced editing mode.

Working within the mobile web interface could also be a beneficial starting point for further work in this space. Issues of accessibility and discoverability are accentuated here, making it a good avenue for developing hypotheses to solve other challenges.