Product Safety and Integrity/Anti-abuse signals/Suggested Investigations
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Suggested Investigations
Automated signals about potentially suspicious behavior prompted
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The Suggested Investigations project uses automated signals that look for potentially suspicious behavior, and turn them into useful prompts for users with access to CheckUser to review to see whether they are worth investigating.
Wikimedia communities face challenges related to abusive behavior, such as sockpuppetry, coordinated manipulation, block evasion, etc. Today, checkusers generally only investigate accounts once the abusive activity happens and becomes noticeable enough to get community attention.
The tool helps those who use CheckUser detect potentially abusive activity earlier and with less effort, and to surface information they otherwise may not be able to see, by highlighting accounts that are worth a closer look.
This project deals with providing specialized tools to detect suspicious activity that can only be used by Wikimedians who have signed the Wikimedia Foundation's confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information. As a result, we don't include detailed information about how these tools work in public documentation like this.
How it works
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We have built a special page where users with access to CheckUser can view a list of accounts surfaced by particular signals. In the screenshot, all information (including the signals themselves) are dummy data.
For each set of accounts that is being surfaced as a suggestion, the page indicates which signals triggered the suggestion. In general, our goal is to configure thresholds that keep the number of false positives low, so that the results are useful.
Users can run investigations based on the suggestions made and mark cases as Open, Resolved, or Invalid. We will use these determinations to help us refine the tool and the underlying signals.
Deployment timeline
[edit]- – Enabled on English and French Wikipedia
- – Enabled on Meta wiki and Login wiki
- – Enabled on Polish, Italian, Simple, and Bengali Wikipedia
- – Enabled on Wikimedia Commons
FAQ
[edit]Is this replacing manual CheckUser work?
No. This tool does not replace CheckUser investigations. Our improvements are designed to help investigators work more efficiently by highlighting possible cases, and not to automate decisions or remove human judgment.
Is this consistent with the CheckUser policy?
Yes, the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department has reviewed this project and confirmed it is in line with the global CheckUser policy.
Does this feature automatically block accounts?
No. The "suggested investigations" tool does not make final decisions. It only surfaces users that may be worth a closer look. Those users with access to CheckUser for a local community remain fully in control and decide which cases to investigate, based on their communities' policies.
Does this mean constructive users might be flagged as potentially suspicious?
Yes, but our goal is to choose thresholds and signals that make this uncommon, to avoid unnecessary review and so that the suggestions are useful and don't waste users' time. We expect to tune these thresholds based on real-world observations of false positives.
Will you publicly document details about these signals?
This project deals with providing specialized tools to detect suspicious activity that can only be used by Wikimedians who have signed the Wikimedia Foundation's confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information.
As a result, we don't include detailed information about how these tools work in public documentation like this. More details are available to CheckUsers, stewards, and others who have signed our confidentiality agreement.
Which wikis will this feature be enabled on?
We are enabling this on a case-by-case basis, primarily after requests to enable it from the local communities CheckUsers. These wikis are on the list because the feature is supported and useful by the community and their CheckUsers. If your community is interested in enabling this feature, please reach out to request it.
Why is some of the language not translated from English?
As the signals are not public, any mention of the name or description of a signal cannot be translated because private translations are not possible with our existing system.
