Moderator Tools

The Moderator Tools team is a Wikimedia Foundation product team working on content moderation tool needs. We are particularly focusing on the needs of medium-sized Wikimedia projects, but expect that most of our improvements will benefit all communities.

We want to understand what tools and processes are missing or hard to use in projects which are growing substantially so that we can prioritise Product investment. We believe there are particular stresses in these communities as a small number of administrators and content patrollers find themselves needing to review a growing number of edits, while also developing processes and workflows already established in larger communities.

The team's focus is on content moderation processes, including page protection, deletion, reporting, and recent changes patrolling, rather than user reporting and moderation, which is more within the purview of the Anti-Harassment Tools and Trust and Safety Tools teams.

Latest Update: We have completed an initial round of work on the mobile web overflow menu, making it more useful for administrators and enabling it for all logged-in users. We are currently implementing a new design for mobile web preferences, while exploring designs for improvements to mobile diffs.

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July 2021 - March 2022: Research
In the 2021/22 Annual Plan (July-June) the team focused on design research for the first 9 months (July 2021 - March 2022). We heard from a wide range of editors on the problems they're facing in keeping the content on their projects reliable and trustworthy.

We then published a research report, Content Moderation in Medium-Sized Wikimedia Projects. This report found content moderation on mobile web to be the highest priority issue.
 * Moderator Tools/Wikimania
 * December update

April 2022 - March 2023: Mobile web
We are currently working on improvements to content moderation on mobile web. This project is scheduled to wrap up in March 2023.

In particular, we have made improvements to the overflow menu, and are currently working on a new mobile design for preferences.

While this work is ongoing we're exploring potential new designs for diffs on mobile.

April - June 2023: PageTriage
In response to the 2022 New Pages Patrol letter, our team will spend some time working on Extension:PageTriage. You can read more about our plans at en:Wikipedia:Page Curation/2023 Moderator Tools project.

Collaborators
As a cross-departmental project, the team is also working with staff members from Community Development, Research, Trust and Safety, and Technical Engagement.