Context
WMF has been investing in understanding and supporting moderators with tool development over the past couple of years. The WMF product and feature teams want to become more specific with interventions and for that they need to know who are moderators?.

On 2024-08-31 we held a preliminary brainstorming meeting to better understand the need. (private meeting notes). We also identified a need to coordinate with Movement Insights before we start this project (the initial coordination is now concluded).

At a high level this task may involve work in the non-exhaustive space below:

• An operationalized definition of a "moderator": who they are, and what they do.
• (stretch) A descriptive explanation and statistics of the characteristics, beyond what they do on the projects.
• A proposal for changing the term "moderator" (the term currently can get mixed with "maintainers", "patrollers", and it also carries an industry load which does not apply to the WM projects.)
• Considering the Product needs and focus and centering moderators's motivations: Proposing one or a few metrics related to moderators (e.g., building on the work on risk observatory, and/or considering other metrics types such as productivity, ...)

Related projects

• edit-types
• risk observatory
• (maybe) SDS 1.2.2. subject to follow-ups.

Mechanics

• This project requires substantial amount of work from a mixed-method set of expertise.
• If we prioritize this project, we should consider proposing a hypothesis for it (under WE 1.3 or SDS 1.2 depending on the final logic we arrive at for this work.)

Note:

• Once this project is concluded, Movement Insight will use the definition of who the moderators are as part of the contributors' funnel

Timelines:

• We agreed that the project starting in October-December (Q2) 2024 is fine for those who requested it.
• The project should be done in a timeline that can inform FY26 annual planning. While the project can continue to have outputs until June 2024, providing staged gradual output is important so the annual planning work can continue informed by it.

Potential dependencies

• productionizing edit-types: T351225