Talk:Moderator Tools/Dashboard

Qualitative patrolling

Regarding the local tools and scripts used by communities, many have the common goal of efficiency. They are often designed to help reacting faster than a human could using the default interface. The goal is to take care of one vandalism, warn users through preset templates, and then switch to the next one. While the need behind this is understandable to keep high quality standards, it has drawbacks.

The main one is that these tools are used to undo quickly promising edits that are of poor quality. This creates a lot of frustration for newcomers who see their patiently crafted edit being put to the trash, while they are acting in good faith. Most patrollers I know react to that saying "I don't have time to fix their edits, otherwise the next vandalism won't get caught." This impacts the renewal of the next generation of editors. Showing backlogs could amplify that feeling or urgency, artificially creating the need to consider all edits the same: dangerous attempts to sabotage Wikipedia.

I note that your design keeps the impact module. This important module should have a social scoring, recognizing the overall quality of a moderator on both fighting against vandalism, but also on helping newcomers, fixing promising edits, and so on. This could be done by measuring the number of Thanks sent by newcomers to tue user (Thanks from other fellow established users would count way less). Otherwise, new moderators will take that dashboard as a "search and destroy" kind of game (the quoted text is an illustration of that spirit: it used to be the slogan of LiveRC, the French Wikipedia moderation tool).

Regarding tasks for new patrollers, I would also use caution on suggesting tasks to jump on. There is nothing more damageable that a user with a lack of editing experience that starts to be an inflexible gatekeeper. An onboarding is necessary, like Growth features do for newcomers. Here, it is a matter of onboarding new moderator, which also requires more than a "please enjoy the buffet" invite. :)

Trizek ^{from FR} 08:10, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

I note that your design keeps the impact module. This important module should have a social scoring, recognizing the overall quality of a moderator on both fighting against vandalism, but also on helping newcomers, fixing promising edits, and so on. This could be done by measuring the number of Thanks sent by newcomers to tue user (Thanks from other fellow established users would count way less). Unfortunately one thing new users are exceptionally bad at, if my experience at the English wiki Teahouse is to be believed, is helping other newcomers, because they often struggle with the same questions and problems. Polygnotus (talk) 13:18, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

Feedback

I posted my feedback here: meta:Talk:Community_Wishlist/W403#Been_doing_this. Polygnotus (talk) 13:14, 28 October 2025 (UTC)

Active discussions

• 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.

Interesting. This looks similar to the list of the latest active topics on the main discussion boards that Russian Wikipedia has on the community portal page (I personally developed it many years ago based on the w:ru:Template:Мониторинг тем template). JWBTH (talk) 15:31, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

@JWBTH This is great to know about, thank you! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 13:37, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

What to do

I opened this page. I didn't really feel like I understood it. I looked at the MVP mockup. I still didn't understand. The problems are:

• The screenshot shows something that will work for people who are using a large screen and who don't need reading glasses. What happens if someone's using a cheap, small laptop, or even a cell phone? Or if they use a large font by default?
• What's that middle line in each box? Is that the edit summary, or is that true?
• And biggest of all: What am I supposed to click on?!

WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:05, 17 February 2026 (UTC)