Content Moderation in Medium-Sized Wikimedia Projects
How editors curate and moderate content on medium-sized Wikimedia projects.
Overview
During 2021/22, the Moderator Tools team carried out research to understand the needs of content moderators in medium-sized Wikimedia projects. This research focused on "medium-sized" Wikimedia projects. We primarily interviewed editors from projects which were not in the top ~10 by size, with a specific focus on understanding content moderation on the Tamil and Ukrainian Wikipedia projects. Our interviewees were predominantly administrators on at least one project, though we also spoke to patrollers, stewards, and tool developers. From our first round of research we identified content moderation on mobile web as the priority problem for content moderators. We want to learn more about desired improvements to the mobile web interface over the coming months.
Top High Level Takeaways:
- Moderation on mobile is so poor as to be practically unusable.
- Moderation tools are rarely well documented and are difficult to discover.
- Administrators on their project felt overworked and understaffed.
- The invisibility of moderation tasks (i.e. they are hard to spot as they occur, or even afterwards) contributes to a feeling that performing them is less rewarding, and may also contribute to difficulties in recruiting and retaining moderators.
- Some of the trickiest moderation tasks to accomplish revolve around settling social disputes.