Moderator Tools/Dashboard
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Moderator dashboard
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As part of the 2025 Contributors Strategy, the Wikimedia Foundation is working on a project which aims to make it easier for editors to identify where their attention is needed on their project, to organise their work, and to be presented with the impact of their contributions. We hypothesise that we can do this best through a customisable and modular centralised dashboard, which surfaces personalised contribution opportunities relevant to the user.
The Moderator Tools team is exploring this idea by starting with a tool that presents newer contributors with opportunities to get more involved in patrolling workflows and to engage with the wider community. Our aim is to take users from their first steps making edits to a project to being capable of participating in more advanced workflows. Ultimately, we want to grow the number of active moderators on Wikimedia projects so that we reduce the burden on each individual patroller and administrator. In the future, if this idea is validated, we will be exploring more advanced modules for this dashboard, which can serve existing experienced contributors and administrators.
Latest update: [May 2026] We have posted learnings from our initial deployment of the dashboard MVP. Read more.
MVP
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To validate our ideas we launched an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in March 2026. This experiment doesn't reflect the final form of this idea and won't be perfect initially, but we hope to gain a broad understanding of whether our hypothesis is valid or not, to inform our future time investments.
This work is being tracked as part of the WE1.3 Key Result: By the end of Q3, 10% of contributors who were presented with a homepage aimed towards new moderators visited it two weeks in a row.
Our plan is to build on the Newcomer homepage, which already contains a framework for defining and arranging engaging modules and surfacing them through a central location. Users will be directed towards a new Special page, Special:PersonalDashboard, which contains brand new modules aimed at introducing them to more involved workflows and activities. We hypothesise that newer editors will find this compelling, and they will be interested in reviewing edits and learning about the key policies and guidelines required for effective patrolling.
We plan to record and analyse data around the ways that editors interact with the homepage during the experiment, and how this impacts their longer term editing behaviours. We'll report this data back on this page to explain what we've learned and what decisions we're making as a result.
Updates
[edit]May 2026
[edit]The Personal Dashboard MVP was deployed to id.wiki, tr.wiki, th.wiki, and simple.wiki in March 2026, and to English Wikipedia in April 2026. Users with more than 100+ edits (and no more than 500 edits on English Wikipedia) received a UI invite and personal tools menu link to view the page.
Following this deployment we collected a range of qualitative and quantitative data about the dashboard and user's thoughts on it.
- More than 10,000 users visited Special:PersonalDashboard since its deployment.
- The page had a second-week retention rate (the percentage of users who visited the page and then visited again 7-14 days later) of ~9%.
- From more than 100 survey responses, we learned that 54% of dashboard visitors would recommend the MVP to another editor. A further 35% were unsure. In explaining why they selected their answer, we learned that users broadly either found the experience useful in its current state, or could see promise in the features and had suggestions for how to improve it to make it useful for them. Relatively few users saw no value in the dashboard idea at all.
Combined with the less formal conversations we've had with contributors about this feature, we consider these to be positive results from our initial experiment. Moving forward our efforts will focus on:
- Improving the Review Changes module and developing a clearer user journey that introduces users to reviewing the edits of others. Further details can be found on a new subpage - /Review Changes.
- Working on the dashboard extension as a platform for teams to assemble appropriate and personalised opportunities. We are collaborating with the Growth team to work towards a future where the Newcomer homepage (Special:Homepage) and the Dashboard are a single unified experience, and working with other WMF teams to build a vision for a location that can host a range of contribution entry points.
March 2026
[edit]The Personal Dashboard MVP is being deployed to pilot Wikipedias this month. Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English Wikipedias will receive the experience first, with a limited rollout to English Wikipedia shortly thereafter.
Below, we noted that we would be deploying just three of the four modules we designed. Because we had some additional capacity, we will be adding the 'Active discussions' module shortly after deployment.
While working on this deployment, and collecting and responding to feedback, we are exploring how to improve the feed of edits for review. In particular, we are prototyping new ways of fetching and presenting edits, including mixing sources of edits (e.g. Recent changes, Watchlist, Related changes), personalising the edits displayed, and providing clearer metadata and actions to take on edits. We'll share some of these prototypes and explorations for review soon.
The dashboard can be tested on test wiki.
December 2025
[edit]We have now defined the specifications for the MVP, which we plan to deploy in January 2026. It will be deployed to four Wikipedias: Turkish, Indonesian, Simple English, and Thai.
This first version will contain three of the modules we described below: Recent activity, Policies & guidelines, and Impact. There will be a survey for users to provide us with feedback, so that we can iterate and improve the features being provided.
While this MVP is being built and deployed, we are exploring what will come next. This may include redesigning existing modules, adding new ones, or integrating with the Newcomer Homepage and Mentor Dashboard. We will provide further opportunities for feedback and input on these plans in the future.
August 2025
[edit]We are currently working on defining the specifications and designs for the modules we will present to users, while making plans with the Growth team around how we will build out the experiment on top of the Newcomer homepage. Our current plans are to build four modules, and we are exploring:
- Recent activity - Displays a selection of recent edits which may need to be reverted but have not yet been patrolled or reverted. We hope to introduce users to the idea of reviewing the contributions of others and removing bad content from their wiki.
- Active discussions - Lists discussions on key noticeboards (e.g. Village Pump) which have recent activity and ongoing discussions. We want editors to learn that these conversations are taking place, and possibly to engage in them, as a way of gaining a deeper understanding of on-wiki dynamics.
- Core content policies - To ensure that editors have a basic understanding of core policies governing content on their wiki, we are designing a module which provides a brief overview of the critical information necessary to make judgements about reverting bad edits.
- Impact - We are considering retaining the impact module (visible at Special:Impact), but adjusting some of the data points to be more relevant to someone engaged in patrolling.
The above modules are still being explored and may change before the start of the experiment.