AUTOMODERATOR AS AN EXAMPLE OF COMMUNITY DRIVEN PRODUCT DESIGN

Resumen

Rushes to adopt the latest technologies to the field of community moderation are generally inequitable for volunteer communities. The closed-door nature of product development at the majority of tech companies means that the logic underlying the creation of new features is opaque. What does this mean for those who want to equitably employ newer technologies in service of volunteer moderators? We present the development and deployment of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Automoderator product as a contemporary alternative to product development processes. We focus on the collaborative process undertaken between the Moderator Tools product team at the Wikimedia Foundation, and volunteer moderator communities, to design and build Automoderator. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool, which uses a language-agnostic ML model that predicts the probability of an edit being reverted. The product team integrated volunteer feedback and direction on a continuous basis. This included the use of existing community-created tools to guide Automoderator's direction, the creation and dissemination of a spreadsheet-based testing tool, soliciting user feedback on a central project page, and integrating an extension to allow communities to control Automoderator's behavior directly. We conclude by discussing the limitations and trade-offs of this approach to product development.