Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-07-04/In focus

In focus

Maintaining ru.WP in the face of a shortage of admins

By MBH

Russian Wikipedia historically has fewer administrators per active user or per article than many other large Wikipedias, and number of ruwiki's active users is ten times smaller than enwiki's and 2 times smaller than dewiki's or frwiki's. Currently there are 63 admins in ruwiki (without adminbots), and many of them are not very active, at the same time ruwiki is the 2nd or 3rd most visited Wikipedia (after en- and, sometimes, ja- or eswiki). Voters on ruwiki's RfA usually very critical of RfA candidates, making it impossible for many experienced, active and well-known users to be elected. In recent years, the Russo-Ukrainian war and political repressions in Russia has made it more dangerous to be a member of the wiki community and even more so to be an admin there, because of which in the last two years (since summer 2022) only two new admins have been elected, and more than 10 since the start of the war (that's about 15% of their number before the war started) lost their status due to inactivity, or abandoned it due to fears for their own safety, or joined one of pro-Kremlin ruwiki forks, one was KIA in Ukrainian army and one, as a real life person, was designated as "foreign agent" by the Russian government.

In the face of a long-standing severe shortage of admins, ruwiki community has developed mechanisms to shift some of the burden of project maintenance to 1) bots, including machine-learning bots, and 2) non-administrators. Several semi-admin user groups have been created to grant separate admin rights to users who can't be elected on RfA. Right now, ruwiki has several dozens of users who can delete pages and summarize an AfDs, edit protected pages, MediaWiki namespace, site-wide scripts and styles, block vandals and protect pages - but they aren't admins. They do this by using admin permissions from their usergroups, and by using a userscript connected to an adminbot.

Since 2009, ruwiki has a group of "summarizers", who have the power to sum up the results of AfDs. Earlier their powers were very limited and they didn't even have the technical permission to delete; there was a bot for deletion by request. Since 2010 they have a permission to delete pages, since 2012 their powers on AfD is almost like admins', the number of such users is slightly less than the number of admins, and 60% of AfD decisions have been made by these users. Initially many users, supporters of a strict hierarchy of users and usergroups, objected to the creation of semi-admin usergroups and said “let them go to RfA,” but further ruwiki's history showed that the decision to create such groups was right.

Since 2016, ruwiki has an “engineers” usergroup for technical specialists, who need to edit protected pages (a stronger analogue of the templateeditor flag in enwiki). Since technically competent users usually can't pass ruwiki's RfA due to lack of social skills, after the establishment of this usergroup almost all edits on protected templates, MediaWiki namespace, scripts and styles in ruwiki are made by engineers, not admins. When the WMF moved interface administrator permissions to a separate usergroup, it was mostly engineers, not admins, who became interface administrators. This WMF decision caused a huge conflict between engineers and a few of "old-school" admins: the latter stated that non-admins shouldn't became an IA because they are not admins, and the former insisted that unlike engineers, who already have proven their competence, admins must pass a JS/CSS proficiency exam to became an IA. Almost all edits in site-wide scripts, styles and system messages are now made by one user, who isn't an admin, but engineer and IA.

In 2017, the first bot for automatic rolling back vandal edits, detected by ML-based system, appeared in ruwiki. Unlike enwiki's ClueBot NG, bot hasn't used its own detection system, but ORES - a WMF-backed ML system, used for highlighting suspicious edits in watchlist. Like ClueBot, bot leaved a message on talkpages of users whose edits was reverted, explaining what happens and where to appeal revert. Edits with not very high ORES scores wasn't rolled back, but streamed to special page for suspicious edits, that is in watchlists of many experienced users; also bot sent requests about users who made several suspicious edits to the ruwiki's analogue of WP:AIV. This bot rolled back tons of vandalism, including ideologically driven edits, whitewashing the Russian political officials, and received mentions in the media about it.

Block script interface: a user can be blocked for vandalism, spam, inappropriate or promotional username. An admins, who used the script, can block user, hide his contribs and delete pages, created by him, by one click.

Since the second half of the 2010s, ruwiki's checkuser developed two adminbots that perform many tasks: from blocking open proxies and IP/users whose edits were repeatedly rolled back, to protecting articles from (automatically detected) edit wars and vandalizing raids. In 2023 he created userscript and bot, allowing trusted non-admins to block IP and new users for clearly disruptive edits and protect actively vandalized articles. Currently, this script and bot are used by ~10 trusted users.

In 2022, after the start of the war, another user created a bot for detection of a specifically anti-Ukrainian vandalism: this bot streamed suspicious edits to a special channel on ruwiki's discord server. In 2024, the author of the first ORES-based bot improved it by adding detection based on LiftWing scores, AbuseFilter-generated edit tags and text patterns (so it absorbed anti-Ukrainian bot) and implemented streaming of the contents of suspicious edits to the ruwiki's discord server. After that he decided to shut down automatic rollbacks, because he wasn't satisfied with the false positives rate. From the fall of 2017 to the spring of 2024 ORES-based bot did 120,000 rollbacks. The checkuser mentioned above then created his own automatic rollback bot, that uses both ORES and a self-written detection system; bot owner assumes that the new bot would have fewer false positives.

Vandal edit in Discord stream: a word "deputies" replaced with "faggots", spelled with Latin letters to avoid AbuseFilter rules

Suspicious edits stream in watchlist, with a rollback button

Meanwhile, users mentioned above implemented a mechanism to revert problematic edits directly from the discord server by clicking the buttons under the post in the discord channel. An edit can be rolled back with a standard reason, or one of 12 more detailed reasons (for example, “No reliable sources” or “Replacing the transcription without page move or move request”), or a manually entered reason. The bot deletes processed edits (rolled back or approved) from the channel, so the channel contains only edits that have not yet been processed. More than 1300 edits have been rolled back using this tool since its establishment 1.5 months ago. The same edits are streamed to a certain wiki page, with excerpt from diff text on edit comment (often it's enough to recognize an edit as destructive), and edit can be rolled back by pressing a link just in the comment without opening a diff (the link leads to Toolforge-hosted, OAUTH-authorized tool that did rollback). This bot also works on Ukrainian Wikipedia, streaming suspicious edits to wiki and to discord (for certain reasons - to ruwiki's discord too, not ukwiki's, but there are several experienced ukwiki users in the ruwiki's discord), it makes more than 100 rollbacks per month in ukwiki.

This story shows how, thanks to bot owners and semi-admin usergroups, a very small group of people numbering only several dozens active users can effectively maintain two million ruwiki's articles, ensuring the functioning of the 2nd or 3rd most visited wikipedia.

In this issue

4 July 2024 (all comments)

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• I am reminded of a discussion in a local Chapter meeting, perhaps a whole decade ago, in which a much-respected Arbitrator predicted that the future will be in unbundling Admin powers. It has not happened much; I have become a rollbacker and "event organizer" (actually a coach for newbies) in ENWP, and in Commons I fairly often use my file mover right, but we WP sergeants are neither many nor powerful. No, I am not seeking more bits of officer power for myself but others might make good use of a different fraction. Jim.henderson (talk) 17:14, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
  • It would have been better to have a single flag, but it is not feasible. Now it's difficult to get elected as admin, and there are few active admins. This division of rights is a must for ruwiki. BilboBeggins (talk) 19:32, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
• I am one of the very few (two ever?) users who have been through an RfA in both Russian (2008?) and English (2012?) Wikipedias, I do not have an impression that one RfA was significantly more difficult than another one.--Ymblanter (talk) 06:21, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
  • Maybe it was easy to get admin flag in ruwiki in 2008, but it is pretty hard to get any important flag now there. I particularly have faced resistance even for a patrolled flag, from people who either were part of Datapult or are active in forks and are banned now on ruwiki. While I applied for Xfdcloser flag, I got an oppose vote from Jukoff on the grounds that my reply was badly formatted, even though he was the one who got the formatting bad while answering. Top Xfdclosers couldn't get admin flag. BilboBeggins (talk) 19:32, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
• I wouldn't call the flag summarizer. Xfdcloser seems a better adaptation, because that is what we do. BilboBeggins (talk) 19:32, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
• For what it's worth, introducing interface administrators wasn't a WMF decision. I worked on it in my free time and all the decisionmaking followed community and developer processes. (You can find more background on the old feedback page at m:Creation of separate user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS.) --Tgr (talk) 11:38, 6 July 2024 (UTC)
  

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