< Wikimedia Apps < Team < Android

Background

The Android team heard a variety of requests across several languages to create interventions to ensure the edits made in the apps are of quality. Additionally, tenured community members asked for moderation tools that do not show performance preferences to a single language wiki, an example can be found in the 2022 wishlist. The team also wants to ensure we are not simply re-creating an experience that exists but enhancing workflows that are proven to work while addressing gaps in equity as it relates to moderation.

With the team's recent release of a native watchlist, contribution history, and edit history, as well as the addition of the undo and rollback button on the diff screen there is an opportunity to create a moderating solution in the app. The solution will leverage the strengths of workflows that exist for mobile micro contributions.

Once we create a V1 anti-vandalism tool catered to experienced moderators across languages, we will explore the implementation of a training task to introduce experienced editors to patrolling if they have not done patrolling before. This will be done in very close partnership with the community. We will also work with the research team to improve ORES, and systems like it, and the Moderator tools team who is tackling this problem space on Mobile Web, so that there is practical continuity for cross-platform users.

Product Requirements:

  • Editors can review diffs for a variety of edits
  • The ability for editors to ‘revert’ or ‘skip’ suggestions
  • Ability to display recent edits in varying wiki languages
  • Allowing editors to create and store warning messages to accompany the revert
  • Onboard experienced editors to patrolling on the app (V2)

Technical Limitation

Presently, we will not be able to have multiple languages in a single feed, but users will be able to switch between languages.

Hypothesis & Validation

Hypothesis & Assumptions

We believe that if there is an easier way for users to patrol tasks, and we can structure this in a way that it becomes an advanced-level task. We can give easier patrolling tasks (or a training task) to editors that are experienced, but do not have sysops or rollback rights and then uplevel them after reaching a threshold of initial patrolling activities. We believe to achieve this we must start with a proof of concept for general patrolling of edits based on users that have rollback rights. Finally, we assume that patrolling recent edits is desired as an initial priority and is more fitting for mobile than NPP, AFD, and AFC. Additionally, we assume there will be community consensus on a training task across languages.

Validation

  • Key Indicator 1: 65% of Target mature audiences that use the tool say they find it helpful for maintaining the quality of wikis and would recommend it to other patrollers
  • Key Indicator 2: Edits made by mature audiences increase by 5%
  • Key Indicator 3: 10% of target mature audiences engage with filter for preferences
  • Key Indicator 4: 65% of Target mature audiences engage with the tool at least three times in a thirty day window
  • Guardrail: Experienced users without rollback rights, users that have and have not used alternative patrolling tools equally understand the workflow
  • Guardrail: We do not receive reports of tool being used to negatively target underrepresented content or contributors based on in-app reporting mechanisms

How to Follow Along

We have created T322083 as our Phabricator Epic to track this work. We encourage your collaboration there or on our Talk Page.

There will also be periodic updates to this page as we make progress. Additionally, if you would like to be a part of our moderated design feedback sessions, please indicate your interest on our talk page, and we will follow up.

Updates

February 2023: Initial Design Concepts

The team created initial design concepts based on our learnings from existing tools and existing feedback we read about the shortcomings of those tools. We socialized the initial design concepts with the Moderator Tools Team and Research Team.

We will incorporate the feedback into the design concepts and work on a protocol for moderated and asynchronous feedback from app users. In the mean time we are starting direct outreach to schedule moderated feedback sessions and secure translation mechanisms for those sessions. Once the protocol is on MediaWiki, we will send a wider communication to start getting asynchronous feedback on our talk page. The design concepts are intended to give examples of how we would like to address some of the pain points of other tools, but we are early into this process and the designs will evolve and expand as we receive feedback in the coming weeks.

January 2023: Comparative Review and Existing User Research

The team conducted a comparative review to understand existing patrolling tools. During our review we considered what similarities and differences exists between the tools, and which tools worked well on mobile.

The complete list of tools we reviewed include:

  • Huggle
  • Twinkle
  • TwinkleMobile
  • STiki
  • SWViewer
  • WikiLoop Double Check
  • CheckWiki
  • ReWarn
  • CheckWiki

By evaluating these tools we learned that the majority of tools only worked well on Desktop with the exception of 3. Only two of the above solutions worked well across a variety of language wikis. Common elements across these tools included:

  • Icons to represent the main action (e.g. revert, speedy deletion, welcome user, etc.)
  • Access to templates
  • Filters
  • List of contributions
  • Diffs
  • Information about the editor

In addition to our comparative review of the tools we pulled together reoccurring requests from patrollers regarding existing tools

  • Filter contributions by topics of interest and specific time period
  • Ability to easily exclude contributions that have already been patrolled
  • Not requiring special privileges such as rollback rights to access tools
  • Include a middle option between skip and revert
  • Tools that promote collaboration

December 2022: Proof of Concept Prototype

The team created a proof of concept prototype to explore what was possible with existing APIs.

We were able to expose the ORES score to give users an idea of the likelihood something is vandalism. We would ideally send feedback to the research team's API for improvements.

November 2022: Defining Initial Audiences

The team conducted research to determine how many users in the Wikipedia apps had sysops and rollback rights (T322065). What we found was 372 Android app users had sysops and rollback rights while 176 iOS users had sysops and rollback rights. This led us to decide to roll out the feature in the Android app first while the iOS development team works on building Watchlist. We then wanted to get an idea of the distribution of sysops and rollback rights users across languages. This information guided our decision around initial target language communities to conduct direct outreach to for our initial research:

  • enwiki
  • frwiki
  • zhwiki
  • eswiki

While these are the language wiki communities and OS users we will focus on for direct outreach we welcome and highly encourage feedback and ideas from any app user with patrolling experience. We are open to the feedback of Web users, however, we will prioritize the feedback of app users. The Moderator Tools team will be building experiences for Web users, and we are in close communication with that team to learn from their findings and strive for continuity across platforms.

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