Weekly update:

We have compiled prior research conducted by the WMF on the subject matter, categorized by topic matter. Most of this prior work from Design and Design Research focuses on specific workflow explorations of specific user-groups, or a focus on patrolling activity. We have some prior work done outside of this remit, but it's a lot more sparse than the body of work conducted on workflows. Specifically, there has not been a lot of concrete definitional work done previously.

A quick review of academic literature around moderation tends to surface two main "streams": work focused on commercial content moderation, and work focused on volunteer moderation, often volunteer community moderation. The latter is closest to what we're trying to define, but as far as we are aware there are very few attempts to define the type of work done by volunteer community moderators, since so much of this is specific to their technological and social contexts. VCMs tend to get defined by their non-professional nature, and the fact that they are drawn from the communities that they then moderate. We are continuing to try and reconcile the broader use of the term "moderator" with the goal of the overall project.

Update:

• Working on a definition of moderation actions
• Post-offsite, we have settled into a definition of moderators and moderator actions that essentially describes specific actions or activities that we believe are "core" or easily recognized as moderation actions, and more peripheral activities that may indicate moderator activity or status, but are not as closely related.

Some working definitions for moderation work and maintenance work (closely related) follows (with thanks to Yu-Ming):

Moderation is focused on the social and governance work needed to sustain an online community. This entails the creation and revision of community values, rules, and norms, and the social work required to support this (e.g. guiding discussion, modeling norms) in addition to the technical work of enforcing the space’s boundaries (by removing content or users that fall outside of these boundaries). Moderators are the human actors that carry out moderation actions with the intent of performing moderation work. Note that non-human actors (such as bots) can carry out moderation actions, but we restrict the definition of "moderator" for our purposes to human actors since it is reliant on the subjective intention of the human taking the action, or creating/directing/modifying the non-human actor that takes the action.

Maintenance is the technical activity that allows the community space to exist in its current or desired form, focused on the creation and ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure that facilitates regular activity in the community. Good examples of maintenance work that is also moderation work include: the creation of templates or bots that facilitate a policy on a wiki (e.g. archival bots, Articles-for-Deletion templates, creation of maintenance categories). Non-moderator maintenance work might include things like renaming pages in accordance with the Manual of Style, gadget maintenance, contributions to MediaWiki, etc.

Our remaining task is to then articulate a useful and measurable set of moderation actions, which we generally believe to be carried out in the course of performing moderator work.

Update (short week in the US):

• We are continuing work on the moderation action spreadsheet. I believe we are at a point where we have defined a good set of actions that correspond to the most easily-identifiable actions that we can clearly and confidently call "moderator actions".
• In the upcoming week we will be refining this list, especially actions that are a bit more nebulous or less easily defined, and then will switch over to support @Isaac and his team on the quantitative work to meet this OKR.

Update:

• Expanded out the moderation action spreadsheet, to the state where it is ready for hand-off to Isaac. We will continue working closely with the quantitative side of the team as they work on T377324
• Begun writing the final report, notably summarizing and extending the prior state-of-research piece to incorporate a (very brief!) literature review of academic sources.
• Received feedback of the working definitions; no new draft is ready quite yet, but we're working on it.