On English Wikipedia, is sentiment around Temporary Accounts and the experience of patrolling temporary accounts positive or negative?

WE 4.8 "Improve patrolling of TA accounts" rests on the assumption, based on feedback from English Wikipedia, that Temporary Accounts are either harder to patrol or have caused patrolling, in general, to become harder. In the first half of Q3 2026, we investigated these complaints by analyzing activity on English Wikipedia’s Sockpuppet Investigations and Administrator Intervention against Vandalism pages (T415103). The team also worked on creating a tool to surface clustered temporary accounts, in order to make it easier for patrollers to see if a group of temporary accounts are associated with each other.
In the latter half of Q3, we want to tackle the qualitative part of this assumption. Have the improvements and new features been received well? Are patrollers and UWERs aware of these new features? Is this belief - that Temporary Accounts make patrolling harder - widespread?
This work is largely evaluative. It will help us answer the core question of whether or not patrollers’ perception that patrolling is harder after the introduction of temporary accounts, has shifted after the work done under WE 4.8 (and other related KRs). The team believes that it is worthwhile to get a snapshot of user sentiment around patrolling, especially paired with previous surveys done around Temporary Account satisfaction (T402277, T391400).

Approach

We will be deploying a survey on English Wikipedia, aimed at two key populations:

1. Users with temporary account IP viewing rights (checkuser-temporary-account). This would cover the temporary account IP viewer group, administrators, checkusers, bureaucrats, and oversighters. I have calculated about 780 unique members of all of these groups. The majority of improvements done under WE 4.8 has been aimed at helping this group.
2. Users who have reverted an edit made by a temporary account within the last month, who do not have temporary account IP viewing rights. This is our "general audience" group, who has had some experience interacting with temporary accounts, but who do not have access to the same tools that WE 4.8 has focused on creating. Querying suggests that there were about 12,000 such users in January 2026.

Dependencies

• The timing of survey deployment depends largely on when the next set of features are rolled out under 4.8, as we don't want to deploy the survey too soon after new features are introduced.
• We are willing to potentially extend the due-date of this survey (as in, date by which we expect analysis and findings presentations) as a result of the former. I provisionally set a soft-deadline for the end of March (end of Q3) with the understanding that it is likely to extend beyond that.