Wikimedia Product/Perspectives/Tools/Tools For Moderators

Summary
The tools and processes used for reviewing and moderating content are critical to the growth of the projects, but have historically been overlooked. Communities have, for the most part, been left to develop their own moderation workflows, tools and solutions – which means that community-built systems tend only to utilize the building blocks at their disposal: templates, gadgets, user scripts, and wikitext. This approach results in solutions with limited capabilities, that tend not to be portable, lack automated testing and code review, and don't support localization.

Many of these tools and processes also have steep learning curves and require considerable technical acumen to use. The more complex the process is, the more it limits the number of people who are able or willing to participate. This, in turn, leads to a less diverse pool of reviewers and, we suspect, contribute to problems of systemic bias in our content. And, fewer moderators makes the review process slow, impacting newcomer productivity. In order to grow and diversify the pool of moderators, moderation tools must be made to work for less technical users, and the Foundation must drive this investment in a platform which enables community developers to create more portable, localizable tools, and in resources to support better practices in code development.

White Paper
DRAFT

Resources
Author., 20xx title https://www.linklink.net