Edit Review Improvements/New filters for edit review

The Special:Recent Changes page is a central starting point for many types of edit review. Enabling reviewers using this page to find good-faith but struggling newcomers will be a first step towards providing the more supportive new-user review process that the Edit Review Improvements project is aiming for. At the same time, the suite of new tools Collaboration Team is planning for the RC page—as a beta option initially—should make edit-reviewing more efficient generally by helping reviewers to better target their efforts.

Phase-One Improvements


Phase One RC page changes—slated to be completed by March, 2016—include the following new capabilities and improvements:

Contribution quality predictions
By enabling users to filter for good-quality edits, these filters empower reviewers seeking merit; by enabling detection of bad-quality edits, they make numerous types of edit-review more efficient. The quality predictions are made by ORES, a machine learning service trained on a large set of edits previously scored by human editors.

Filters with different levels of accuracy are provided (ranging from "Very likely have problems" to "May have problems"). Stricter, more accurate filters find fewer false positives but return fewer results overall and so miss more of their target. Less accurate filters cast a wider net and find more of their target, but they also find proportionally more false positives.

User intent predictions
By enabling users to filter for edits made in good-faith, these filters empower reviewers seeking to support good-faith users; by enabling detection of bad-faith edits, they assist reviewers looking for damaging contributions. Like the Quality filters above, these predictions are made by the machine-learning service ORES. Also as above, filters at different levels of accuracy are provided to meet different users' needs.

Experience level filters
Research shows that new editors are particularly vulnerable to rejection. The Experience level filters enable reviewers to treat new users with the care they require and to identify contributions by users at a couple of more advanced levels. These are the Experience level filters:
 * Newcomer: fewer than 10 edits and 4 days of activity

The filters return the edits of users who are currently logged in only.
 * Experienced: more days of activity and edits than “Newcomers” but fewer than “More experienced.” (corresponds to autoconfirmed status)
 * More experienced: more than 30 days of activity and 500 edits. (corresponds to extended confirmed status)

More powerful filtering
Most previous RC page filters offered only a simple option to show or hide a certain property (X). By augmenting these filters so that they now let users show or hide both X and its opposite (notX), the current tools provide more control. For example, previously, one could show Wikidata edits or hide Wikidata edits, but one could not not show only Wikidata edits.

Furthermore, by organizing filters into logical groups, the new arrangement provides an improved ability to narrow results. (Logically, the new arrangement provides groups of OR filters, with each group of ORs being connected to other groups by ANDs.)

Highlighting function
Among the many user interface improvements included in this project is a user-controllable highlighting function. By letting reviewers apply color to emphasize desired edit properties in the results area, Highlighting makes Recent Changes data more meaningful. Among other user benefits, this new interpretive layer adds another tool for prioritizing work

Beyond Phase One
Once the Beta features described above are in place, we will gather user input and test satisfaction, then finalize plans for more improvements. The following options are under consideration:

Extend new functionality to more pages
Add the new filters and improved filtering interface to Watchlist, User contributions, Related changes and other, similar pages.

“Recently used filters”
By enabling the system to remember reviewers’ recent filter settings, help users to repeat their most common tasks quickly and easily, without having to input settings each time.

Upgrade interface and capabilities for the untouched RC page features
Phase one changes won’t affect all tools on the RC page. The following tools will remain unchanged: Namespace filters, Tag filters, filters for time frame, and number of results. Future efforts will likely bring these tools up to the new UI standard. This will enable the selection of multiple namespaces, multiple tag filters, and more specific time-frames.