Editing team/Community Conversations

Welcome! The Editing Team uses this page to document the outcomes of the conversations we host to better understand the needs and challenges people experience when they begin contributing to Wikipedia.

Next Conversation

TBD

Past conversations

On Tuesday, June 10, 2025, ~15 volunteers who are active at en.wiki joined WMF Staff in a Discord voice chat to discuss Tone Check.

What follows is an initial attempt to document the concerns we understood volunteers to be raising (and opportunities they might present) in this Discord chat, as well as those raised in the on-wiki discussion that prompted it and followed it.

Discussion about the below is ongoing at en.wiki.

Potential scenarios

Category:Drafts
Potential scenario Details Potential outcomes Opportunities [i]
Scenario A: Tone Check could nudge people away from more obvious peacock words (e.g. "iconic") and towards subtler forms of biased writing that are more difficult for the model and people to detect. People acting in bad faith might try to repeatedly change the wording of what they've written until they find a way to use language that's promotional, derogatory, or otherwise subjective while also being subtle/ambiguous enough for Tone Check NOT to activate.
  1. Tone Check inadvertently increases the amount of biased / non-encyclopedic content on Wikipedia.
  2. Tone Check could help people editing in bad faith obfuscate COI editing.
  1. Introduce a hidden tag that gets appended to edits Tone Check would become activated on before making the feature visible to people editing. This way, volunteers could see the edits and people Tone Check would activate it for, were it to be made available. Note: this functionality actively being worked on.
  2. Enable volunteers to prevent Tone Check from becoming activated on certain pages/categories where people tend to edit in bad faith more frequently. E.g. contentious topics, companies, public figures, conflicts, etc. Please add ideas/thoughts to T393820.
  3. Limit how many times Tone Check can be activated within a given edit (or for a given user within a certain time period) so people acting in bad faith can't use the feature to craft edits that could circumvent it.
  4. Enable volunteers to see the reason someone provided for declining to revise the tone of what they have written when Tone Check asks them to consider doing so. Please add ideas/thoughts to T395175.
  5. Enable volunteers to see specific words/phrases the model detects as being promotional, derogatory, or otherwise subjective, along with the model's confidence in such predictions, so that volunteers can consider integrating these patterns into existing moderation tools and workflows.
  6. ???
  7. ???
  8. ???

i. Note: These are the ideas mentioned so far. We need your help to identify additional ideas and, ultimately, evaluate the extent to which the "final" set of ideas will be effective at both supporting experienced and newcomers.

Scenario B: Moderator/patrollers/reviewers could become less effective at catching people attempting to add spam to Wikipedia because Tone Check could discourage them from inadvertently "outing" the mal-intent they are editing with. People editing with a conflict of interest (or other mal-intent) could leverage Tone Check to write in a promotional, derogatory, or otherwise subjective tone that is subtle enough for moderators/patrollers to potentially miss. This would, in effect, remove one of the key signals (tone) volunteers currently depend on to prioritize investigating potential COI and other forms of bad faith editing.
Scenario C: By building a model like the one underlying Tone Check, and making it available under an open source license, people could run the model locally and, in turn, use AI to generate non-neutral text that on-wiki tools might not detect.

Information
Date: at 18:00–19:00 UTC
Subject: Edit check helps newer volunteers make constructive changes to Wikipedia projects by offering actionable feedback while they are editing. This community conversation will focus on a new check: Peacock Check. Peacock check will prompt people adding puffery or promotional terms to write in a neutral tone..
Video conference link: https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/86108522272
Main meeting language: English
Objective

Discover ways the proposed Peacock Check user experience, and underlying machine learning model, could be improved.

Sign up (optional)
Mockup of Paste Check User Experience –

Information
Date: 17:30 UTC
Subject: Edit check discussion with Open Foundation West Africa volunteers. This conversation is also open to any volunteer interested in the subject.
Video conference link: https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/85700503885
Main meeting language: English
Notes-taking
Objective

Knowing more about Edit check: current checks and upcoming projects around copy/pasting, multi-checks and more!

Sign up (optional)

Notes

  • 13 volunteers joined the 29 October Community Conversation, including one person who is brand new to editing Wikipedia.
  • Of the ~5 volunteers who spoke during the meeting, all expressed enthusiasm for Edit Check and its potential to help newcomers feel encouraged and clear about how to contribute to Wikipedia.
  • In response to the first iteration of the Paste Check user experience we shared, volunteers noted:
    • The value of adding a confirmation step before the text people pasted into an article is deleted
    • It might be more intuitive to people who are new to frame the reason for Paste Check appearing as being about plagiarism.
    • How supported they felt by Edit Check expressing gratitude to people regardless of how they respond to the choice the Paste Check is presenting to them: Keep the content they pasted or Remove it
    • Knowing Paste Check exists helps them – as a reader – to feel more confident in what they read on Wikipedia.
  • One volunteer described Edit Check as "2-step verification for edits" which resonated with everyone present.

3 July 2024 Editing Team Community Meeting
Information
Date: 17:30 UTC
Subject: Edit check : Expanding Edit Check
Video conference link: Zoom
Main meeting language: English
Notes-taking
Objective
  • CopyVio Check: learn what volunteers think of the proposed user experience for the initial version of the CopyVio Check
  • Real-time Checks : learn what volunteers think about a version of Edit Check that would show people feedback, in real-time.
Sign up (optional)

Notes

~10 English-speaking volunteers with varying levels of wiki-experience joined the 3 July 2024 conversation to discuss copyrights in the context of Edit Check.

The ideas that emerged during the meeting are documented below.

Reactions

  • Volunteers present were unanimously supportive of an Edit Check that would prompt newcomers to consider whether the content they are adding could create a copyright violation.
  • Several volunteers experienced with training newcomers were present, all of whom shared that the newcomers they've supported are NOT familiar with the concept of copyright
  • Voluneers were in agreement, that newcomers are willing to follow instructions that they perceive as being intended to help Wikipedia.
    • Reason being: the newcomers they are experienced supporting are often are arriving to contribute clear about Wikipedia's importance and motivated to help the project.
  • Volunteers emphasized that we need to continue assuming that the newcomers who will encounter Edit Check are likely to being seeing concepts/terms like copyright, reliability, neural point of view, etc. for the first time. As such, it's crucial that Edit Check use language and terminology that people are likely to recognize and understand.

Information
Date: 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST)
Subject: Edit check : nouveau prototype
Video conference link: Zoom
Main meeting language: français
Objective

Après le succès de Edit Check suggérant d'ajouter une référence, il est temps pour l'équipe Editing de confirmer le succès de ce système avec un nouveau prototype. Nous vous invitons à une conversation communautaire, où nous vous présenterons les résultats du check sur l'ajout de références, puis nous réfléchirons ensemble aux erreurs les plus communes des novices lors de l'édition, afin de réfléchir au prochain prototype.

Sign up (optional)

Notes

New Checks ideas:

  • Help in structuring an article
  • Helping to ensure text coherence and conciseness
  • Checking copy/paste
    • Some people take pieces of source material and paste them together, which is illegal (and demotivating, as these modifications are deleted). Checking that an action it's not a copy/paste could inform users of not doing it.
  • Suggest good sources when editing.
  • Edit Check currently identifies sources rejected by a community.
  • Find/Suggest previously used sources
    • Yes, if they are within the article. No, if they are elsewhere. And some sources that are suitable for an article are not necessarily suitable elsewhere.
  • Suggest modifications to articles from other editions of Wikipedia (translations; be careful to master this tool).

Some side notes:

  • "I was able to participate more easily when someone helped me."
  • You need to take your time reading the rules.
  • As long as you haven't gained any experience, you're not approved as an editor.
  • Beware of smaller wikis, which don't always have as many rules or templates to enable participation.

South Asia Open Community Call
18 February 2024, 18:00 UTC+0530
Presentation of Editing and Growth features.

Archives

Editing team Community Conversations: 2022, 2023, 2024

References

    Category:Drafts