PPelberg (WMF)

YGM

Hey, You've got mail via ppelberg[at]wikimedia.org. Thanks, RhinosF1 (talk) 15:58, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Subscribe fails, and the design model comments

I used Subscribe and tried a variety of kinds of edits. Subscribe failed to report most of them. To make the issue simple and clear, see this edit pretending to change my vote. I can't use the subscribe tool if it's not going to show that someone altered my vote. The reason subscribe doesn't show stuff is because you're thinking the unit here is "comment". The correct unit is "edit". We need to see the edits. We already have an entire infrastructure built around edits. Here's a real-world talk page example moving two chunks of content and deleting 4 templates. We need to be able to see any arbitrary edit to the section. This is an already-solved problem, standard diff. One diff can also span 300 edits or more. No one wants to log on and deal with 300 notifications for one Village Pump section, plus another 150 notifications for an RFC somewhere.

And that is why the community has requested section watchlisting year after year - the existing tool virtually defines the needed functionality.

As you know, I previously tested reply tool and found all sorts of content corruption by deliberately throwing ugly wikitext at it. Ironically, reply tool failed the very first time I tried posting a comment for real. My comment consisted of nothing but plain letters, spaces, and periods. All reply tool had to do was accurately insert the plain letters, spaces, and periods into the page. It was unable to post the comment without breaking it. It managed to mangle plain letters, spaces, and periods.

In Phabricator I see multiple people coming in wanting control over the indentation, raising issues with the default signature, I see no apparent plan to deal with various discussions that might need : or * or #, and apparently your plan for tables and stuff is to launch a major project hacking down into the parser and redefining wikitext to get it to work.

If I may, I think I see a common thread behind all of the issues above. You're caught fighting against the nature of the wikipage. You're you're trying to construct your familiar discussion model atop a platform that does not fit the model.

The outcome of the Talk consultation was to explicitly keep wikipages, with the intent of embracing wikipages, continuing to use our existing tools and support for wikipages, and to make it super-easy to make the identical comments we make today.

1. Give a reply link.
2. Give a text box with signature and auto-indentation (which may be hidden).
3. Maybe have a button to unhide the markup for the indentation&signature, and edit it if we wish.
4. Go to line Z in the wikitext, insert that blob (a plain insert), and save.

That pretty well solves the issues above except for section watch, and it does so and without hacking the parser. The basic flow is identical to what you have now. Anyone can just click reply, type a comment, and save. The mental model is "tool assisted wikitext edit", it merely happens to make basic comments dead-simple. Alsee (talk) 11:56, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Update to commentlinks.js gadget

I am about to update my comment links gadget to link the comment's timestamp rather than add a separate [ link ] button. If you prefer the old style, that gadget will be available at commentlinks-v1.js. As before, this gadget is experimental and may stop working at any time, see T275729 for the task to make this a proper feature. Thanks, ESanders (WMF) (talk) 12:10, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Moderator Tools newsletter - Issue #2

Welcome to issue #2 of the Moderator Tools newsletter! It's been about a year since the first one (sorry for the delay), but we're excited to tell you what our team has been working on since then, and where you can guide our ongoing and upcoming work.

Automoderator

Automoderator's configuration page as of September 2024.

Automoderator is now feature-complete for its initial release! Automoderator is a highly configurable automated anti-vandalism tool which reverts edits that a machine learning model determines to be vandalism. It can be enabled, disabled, and configured at any time by administrators via a Community Configuration form. Automoderator is now in use on Indonesian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, with other projects at various stages of discussion and setup. You can track data about Automoderator's activity so far via a Superset dashboard. To request Automoderator on your Wikimedia project, please refer to the deployment steps.

We are wrapping up our focused time developing Automoderator while we review data and feedback about its impact. We also still plan to provide support for small Wikimedia projects with few/no administrators (T372280), and integrate the multilingual revert risk model, which is an improved version of the model currently in use, with support for 47 language Wikipedias. We're looking for support testing the multilingual model to better understand its behaviour - please check out the testing process and review some edits!

Nuke extension ('Mass delete')

During the 2024-2025 Wikimedia Foundation fiscal year, our team wants to make improvements to the software that moderators (patrollers, administrators, stewards, etc.) are using today, rather than focusing on building new tools. Although it's valuable to build new features, it's also important that we continue maintaining the important tools that are already being used to maintain and improve Wikipedia's quality.

Nuke search interface.

One such project is to make usability and feature improvements to the Nuke extension (known as 'mass delete' on some projects). We have contracted a community developer, Chlod, who has worked on the extension in the past, to help us with this! With the Nuke project, we hope to make a number of improvements, including additional filters, increasing the deletion time range, automated deletion of related pages, and bug fixes. Read more about this project, and provide feedback, at Extension:Nuke/2024 Moderator Tools project.

Recent Changes

As part of our efforts to improve existing impactful moderator tooling, we are working on a project for a few months to make improvements to Special:RecentChanges and related workflows. We will be prioritizing work for this project on an ongoing basis, but have some larger projects that we will solicit input for via our project page. We have a brief survey at Moderator Tools/Survey:Recent Changes to gather input for this project - please answer the questions if you're interested.

Task prioritization

Finally, looking to the future, we plan to research and work on tasks identified as part of the Community Wishlist focus area titled 'task prioritization'. We'll be looking for opportunities to speak with editors about how they decide what needs their attention, and in particular will be investigating the Watchlist to see where we might be able to make usability and feature improvements. If you have thoughts about opportunities in this focus area please share them on the task prioritization talk page, or file a new wish!

Although we have active engineering projects ongoing, we're always happy to chat about your community's content moderation tool needs - feel free to get in contact at Talk:Moderator Tools to let us know where you think we should focus our efforts. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:11, 25 November 2024 (UTC)