Update:

• Reviewed final deliverables for T407493
• Reviewed analysis for UX tests (Userlytics panelists) for IRS non-emergency MVP

Update:

• Worked with Bethany and Katie to prepare UX tests for IRS non-emergency MVP, testing with Wikipedians
• Partially designed and then implemented screeners and a testing protocol for IRS non-emergency MVP, testing with Userlytics panelists (so non-Wikipedians), screened for familiarity with Wikipedia. We did so in order to produce quick-turnaround results on the UX test, and they did come back very quickly as we hoped. Kieran is leading the analysis of these tests at the moment, though I may be tapped to provide assistance if necessary.
• Minor assistance with T407493 analysis, now complete

Flowcharts have been completed. I have also mapped them to IRS categories, in order to facilitate design work on the non-emergency IRS workflows.

We have created flowcharts for various global support processes, which we expect wikis without admins (or, for cases of doxxing, wikis without local oversighters) to use when handling incidents of abuse.

Update:

• Reviewed screener survey, test protocol, outreach messages for IRS non-emergency MVP UX test (for invited participants)
• Helped design + port IRS non-emergency MVP UX test on to Userlytics platform, in preparation for testing with Userlytics panelists
• Minor assistance with T407493 analysis

Update for the last week:

• I've agreed with @KColeman-WMF that the desired deliverable for this is a flowchart of global support structures. This makes sense as global support requests are quite extensively formalized on Meta-Wiki
• Started work on such flowcharts

Update for the week of Sep 29 - Oct 3:

• Assisted in survey design for T402277 (wording, survey flow, survey logic)
• Quick-turnaround analysis for closed-choice questions in T402277

Belated close - The final report explaining findings and our decision to close the KR is completed (link for internal use). It contains a summary of findings, a longer writeup, and examples of generative AI misuse on English Wikipedia with annotations and explanations of context.

After consulting with the team and broader KR owners, we have decided to close this hypothesis.

Mapping non-emergency support structures
Documenting local help and support structures, especially for conflict resolution, across four wikis to inform recommendations for the Incident Reporting System.
Online Social Behavior
N/A (internal use)
Sep 2025
Project lead: Claudia Lo with Katie Coleman, for the Product Safety and Integrity team

Final presentation deck is available for internal use. Closing this ticket.

Pinging @DKumar-WMF to review for close.

Some final updates on elements brought up in this study's research brief:

• Attempts to garner specific comments and feedback on Temp Accounts largely failed, despite efforts from MoveComms and outreach to specific editors
• In the research brief, we initially considered sending out a short survey to gather opinions about the Temporary Accounts rollout. T402277 instead fulfilled this role, so this study did not incorporate its own survey so as to avoid duplicating effort.

Update on findings. @nettrom_WMF has retraced T395618 for the major project rollout wikis, looking at a 30 day window prior to first deployment week compared to a 30-day window after the last deployment (see "Methodological details" below for more.)

I've produced a short writeup for Katie's use, and am now working on a presentation deck for next Tues to share out to the team. On track to finish by listed due date.

We've begun drafting the discussion guide for this project, with a kick-off meeting hopefully scheduled for next week.

We've finished our cataloguing of support structures from Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish and Vietnamese Wikipedias. We are now synthesizing some insights to aid Katie in upcoming prototyping work for the IRS.

Update: We've catalogued 14 more support venues from Japanese and Turkish Wikipedia. At this point, I believe it might be more impactful to work through Vietnamese Wikipedia as both French and English Wikipedia support structures have had prior mapping exercises; I believe that getting a broad spread of wikis is likely more helpful for IRS design work, but I'll be confirming this with Katie in the upcoming week.

Update: We're still waiting for July's data to be available. In the meantime, I have compiled a table of the 31 wikis where Temporary Accounts are enabled, and policies on the temporary-account-viewer usergroup. 60% of the wikis do not currently have a local page for the usergroup (the usergroup page is a red link or redirects to the Meta-Wiki policy); 75% of them use the WMF's local access minimum thresholds for the group.

Update: We've run 7 support venues from ptwiki through our form, and are now working on Japanese and Turkish Wikipedia support venues.

No major update this week.

Update: We've finalized our assessment framework, which uses a form that we will fill out for each support structure we identify. We are now identifying support structures across Japanese, Turkish, English and Portuguese Wikipedia, largely using existing community portals as a starting point.

Update: We're still waiting for more time to pass before we begin quantitative data collection and analysis. On the qualitative front, I have been working with @sgrabarczuk to reach out to ambassadors and find good recruiting venues to get feedback.

Update: We have finished our preliminary selection of wikis, and will begin by mapping support structures on English, Portuguese, Japanese and Turkish Wikipedias. Our selection process only looked at wikis that had more than 10 monthly active admins, on the assumption that these were the ones most likely to have developed bespoke non-emergency support systems. These four wikis were chosen because:

• They cover a wide array of admin capacity (looking at number of admins, number of monthly active admins, and the ratio of monthly active admins to both monthly active editors, and total monthly edits)
• They represent a range in overall size of wiki
• Japanese Wikipedia has a particularly high number of anonymous users, and so are particularly interested to understand how their support structures might differ as a result

Update: We've concluded our research brief alignment and will begin work in earnest, starting by creating an assessment framework for support structures as well as finalizing our chosen wikis for this study.

Weekly update: Research brief alignment meetings concluded, we can begin in earnest. Morten and I will work to figure out the details of our approaches. We've also begun soliciting examples where temporary accounts has helped or hindered attempts to stop bad behaviour from the community, using existing comms channels for the Temporary Accounts project.

Weekly update: given the prioritization of incoming request tasks this quarter assigned to me, this is likely going to be picked up and started later in Q1 (Aug through Sep).

Update: research brief discussion meeting set up for next week.

Weekly update: research brief review meeting scheduled for next week.

Update: given the collaborative and iterative nature of this request, I believe it makes sense if both I and @KColeman-WMF jointly work on this research. I will take lead on wiki selection and identification of support structures, while she will be documenting these different support structures.

After discussion with @nettrom_WMF , I believe this task would be better scoped with this set of primary research goals:

1. Understand impact of deploying Temporary Accounts (TA) on pilot wikis, to inform development of anti-abuse features
   • Is the loss of IP address info at large, significantly detrimental to community anti-abuse efforts?
2. Document uses of TAs for abuse, to inform development of software-based mitigations
   • Are there documented cases where Temporary Accounts have broken existing anti-abuse workflows?
   • If yes, what are potential product recommendations to address these scenarios?
3. Document how IP reveal rights are being rolled out, as they now must be manually granted

@DDeSouza Please add the following project:

Our Meta-Wiki page is now updated and we have completed our share-out. Moving to sign-off column.

After further discussions with the team and with Isaac, we have settled on these additional points:

• The primary purpose of this research is to describe already-occurring phenomena rather than trying to (quantitatively) estimate their prevalence
• We are particularly interested in the ways in which generative AI is negatively impacting the social experience of editors, for instance, accusations of LLM use based on assumed English fluency versus contribution styles

I will also edit the ticket with further details about estimated effort, priority, and the use cases of the research outcomes.

Updated task description after meeting with requesting team. I have some additional notes around scoping and selection of wikis here:

Updated task description, especially around estimated effort and priority, after more discussion with stakeholder group.

Update: we are nearing completion on the written deliverables as agreed upon at kickoff. We're hoping to schedule a share-out sometime in the next week and to update our Meta-Wiki page at that time as well.

We have successfully completed all participant sessions!

Update: Our final two sessions are scheduled, and we have begun analysis of the sessions. The Userlytics workaround we developed (creating an unmoderated version of our testing protocol, conducting the interview portion via Google Meets) worked very well, so we may want to keep this in mind in the future for participants with no webcam.

Synthesis was completed and sent to @DKumar-WMF and Kadeem Khan for review on 16 May. Debra, please review for close?

Update: We're at 3 sessions complete, 3 more scheduled; if all goes well we will have hit our target session count.

Update: We have begun our first sessions for the topic, with three more scheduled.

Update: Using the Design Research Participant Database, we've done our first round of recruitment. We just need to finish a run-through of the testing protocol on our Userlytics platform, and hope to send screeners and start scheduling sessions by end of week.

Update: working on the discussion guide and recruitment screener.

We are continuing research brief scope specification.

We've met for an initial scoping meeting, to discuss some additional aspects of the research. Due to overlapping OOO, we have agreed to deliver final written reports by Jun 5 (the due date on this ticket), but we will be scheduling a share-out presentation and final public updates after Jun 11.

Update: We've pencilled out a timetable and the major writing tasks necessary to get this submission ready. The task description will be updated with a breakdown of tasks and a rough timetable.

That should be possible.

Please add the following:

Our share-out is concluded and the results have been publicly documented, through its Meta-Wiki page and Results sub-page.

@Isaac please review for sign-off

Third pass of categorization is complete. The regex and notebook are available on Gitlab pending merge request. These outputs are also copied into the templates spreadsheet from T384600#10637277.

We have concluded the interview portion of this study. We reached a total of 6 editors: two from German, two from Finnish, one from English, and one from Ukrainian Wikipedia. While this was a little lower than our desired coverage for English, we managed to get interviews with FlaggedRevs users from all three identified modes.

Update: Making steady progress on categorization, finished 9/12 wikis.

Update: Based on the identified most-commonly-used templates from T384600, I have begun cataloguing and categorizing templates based on:

• Whether or not the template is a redirect
• The purpose or main intended use of the template (broadly categorized as "citation-related", "maintenance-related", "style-related", or "other")
• Whether or not the use of the template seems to fit our definition of crowdsourced or distributed moderation

Our kickoff meeting has concluded and we have sketched out the following phrases:

In preparation for the kickoff meeting, we've started a discussion guide. I expect finalization of research methods and goals to happen by the start of next week.

Update - continuing to work on problem definition and finding existing (community-produced) literature on the topic.

We are starting to scope out directions for this project. Given our due date, we will focus primarily on the experiences of experienced editors who currently use Flagged Revisions as a part of their contributions. Recent discussions on Pending Changes on English Wikipedia are very thought-provoking, and Pending Changes is related to Flagged Revisions, but for scoping purposes we are most likely to focus on wikis using FlaggedRevs in override mode. This is subject to change depending on how data collection goes, but for now we can say that we're focusing on the experiences of editors, their use of this extension and their perceptions of its effects on their communities.

• Significant and major progress on analysis and report writing. My immeasurable gratitude and respect for everybody working on this project.

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.

Update (short week in the US):

• We will be closing out interview data collection at the end of this week. In total, we have completed 12 participant interviews, 7 with former admins and 5 with current admins. We covered five wikis - en, es, fr, id and ru.
  • Thanks to Bethany, we are obtaining automated transcripts for the few recordings where we didn't have them previously
  • We have begun data analysis, segmenting out themes and key points
  • We have also begun anonymizing participants (using participant numbers) and are adjusting our internal documentation accordingly

We have successfully received a 2-day extension for the submission deadline, incorporated internal feedback and submitted the paper.

• 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.

Post-offsite update:

• We have completed three more interviews this week, with another scheduled
• Two more interviews are being scheduled
• We are preparing to interview survey respondents who indicate interest in being contacted (T371135#10263674)