Please provide all the following information:
- Context. Provide a short paragraph with some background context for your request, please include links to relevant material.
Edit Check is a new feature designed to guide contributors during the editing process by flagging policy-relevant issues and suggesting fixes. While its current implementation focuses on specific pillars (e.g. references, copyright, non-neutral tone), the broader ambition is to create a flexible framework that reflects community values and norms. However, Wikimedia policies are not always formalized or uniformly interpreted – they’re often “programmed” by volunteers through templates, bots, edit notices, and community consensus. We want to understand how contributors currently translate policy into user-facing interventions, and how they perceive Edit Check as a new potential layer of that process.
- Description.What is your request about?
We’d like to explore how experienced contributors currently think about encoding policy into tools (e.g. templates, bots, edit filters), and gather reactions to Edit Check as a new layer in that ecosystem. What do they value in current approaches? What limitations do they see? How do they feel about machine-assisted moderation that intervenes in real time?
This research should also investigate the broader cognitive models contributors use when enforcing policy: do they think in terms of rules, social negotiation, precedent, etc.? How might Edit Check fit into that mental framework?
- Expected Deliverable. What is the ideal outcome or result of your request?
a/ A synthesis of current methods volunteers use to encode or enforce policy. Including, but not limited to, how they decide what policies/guidelines to program, what tools they use to develop and test these scripts, and how they evaluate their impact/effectiveness
b/ Set of recommendations for the capabilities/requirements experienced volunteers would need to see in order to be motivated to author new Checks and Suggestions
c/ Summary of what motivates people to do this kind of work and how they arrived to it.
d/ Perceptions of Edit Check as a tool for shaping behavior
- Estimated Effort. Please provide an estimate of the amount of work needed to complete this task, if known.
This project will involve defining research goals, recruiting experienced contributors, conducting a number of interviews, synthesizing insights, and sharing findings in a report.
- Priority Please indicate a priority of your task and a small description of what it would unlock for you. We ask you to leave this task as “needs triage” since your request will go through a Backlog refinement process where our team will prioritize the work.
I need this task resolved in:
- 1 month.
- 3 months.
- 6 months.
- Whenever you get to it :-)
- Other. Do you have any other questions or comments ?
This research would unlock the next phase of Edit Check by providing a structural foundation for future checks and informing how we open up authoring capabilities to community members. It ensures that design and technical decisions align with contributor mental models and existing policy-encoding practices.
For use by WMF Research team; please leave everything below as it is:
- Does the request serve one of the existing Research team's audiences? If yes, choose the primary audience. (1 of 4)
- What is the type of work requested?
- What is the impact of responding to this request?
- Support a technology or policy need of one or more WM projects
- Advance the understanding of the WM projects.
- Something else. If you choose this option, please explain briefly the impact below.