Moderator Tools/Recent changes
The Moderator Tools team is currently working on making improvements to Special:RecentChanges and related edit review workflows. We anticipate this project lasting a few months, from approximately November 2024 to April 2025, during which time we hope to improve the process of reviewing new changes to Wikimedia projects.
We have a brief survey at Moderator Tools/Survey:Recent Changes to gather input for this project - please answer the questions if you're interested!
Overview
As part of the WE1.3 Key Result (Increase user satisfaction of 4 moderation products by 5pp each), our team identified that there was an opportunity to make positive changes to the RecentChanges Special page, and related workflows around reviewing new edits. We don't have a fixed plan for what these improvements will entail - we intend to learn as we go and prioritise the highest impact opportunities that we identify. We'll post here when we have questions about work we're considering tackling.
Recent changes layout
One idea that we're interested in exploring is giving the list of edits on RecentChanges an improved UI structure. Please see the design ticket at T380387, where various mockups and ideas have been posted. We think this could improve the readability of the list, especially for newer users who are less familiar with how edit entries are laid out on these pages, while also making it easier for patrollers to scan through the information. We invite your input on the talk page.
Below are early design mockups where we are exploring aligning the information, utilizing menus, icons and/or grouping the elements to improve readability and scan-ability of the edit list.
Exploring aligning the content.
Exploring making information (eg. contribs & talk links) less prominent and moving them inside a menu.
Exploring replacing repetitive content/links with icons.
Exploring grouping the content.
Additional filtering
Tagging recreated pages
One of the inputs for this project is the Community Wishlist. This year, one wish, Mark pages recreated at the already deleted title, caught our attention as a potentially useful improvement that seemed like a relatively quick win.
This tag has now been implemented! Any pages created at a title which was previously deleted will now have the page creation edit tagged with 'Recreated'. This can be filtered for in venues like Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages.
Topic filtering
We would like to add an additional advanced filter to RCFilters for 'Topic', based on the article topic model, which is capable of determining the topic of a page an edit is made to. This would enable editors to filter RecentChanges for edits made in certain topic areas, improving their ability to focus on edits of interest.
Pages without watchers
Another filter we plan to add is for edits made to pages with no page watchers (at the time of the edit). This would enable patrollers to focus their efforts on pages which are least likely to be noticed by other editors.
Language Agnostic Revert Risk Filtering
Codex update
Because we are making changes to this page and its components, we also planned to update it to use Wikimedia's new design system, Codex. This would help to make RecentChanges more accessible and more consistent with other Wikimedia software going forward.
After early technical analysis of the work required to update Recent Changes to Codex, however, we have decided not to move forward with this as part of this project.
Other changes
In addition to the work outlined above, we may also make miscellaneous minor changes or bug fixes, which will be documented here:
- T302140: Mark patrols by rollback as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled"
Project updates
Updates on the project will be posted here.
- February 2025: This project is now well underway! We have already resolved one minor issue (T302140 - some rollback patrols being stored with the wrong information in the database), and implemented the 'Recreated' tag. On the design side of this project, we are currently working on some mockups for the layout of the edit log, and identifying blockers to the RCFilters Codex conversion (T383092). In engineering, we are working on storing the correct data for the 'unwatched pages' filter (T20790) and fixing a few bugs where the 'Recreated' tag is being added in unintended circumstances (e.g. T385253). Topic filtering is currently blocked while we await the Campaigns team's work to make the topic model more accessible to MediaWiki software.