Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/In focus
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Maintaining ru.WP in the face of a shortage of admins
The Russian Wikipedia historically has fewer administrators per active user or per article than many other large Wikipedias; the number of active users is ten times smaller than the English Wikipedia, and 2 times smaller than the German or French. Currently there are 63 admins on 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 English, and sometimes after Japanese or Spanish[1]). Voters in ruwiki's RfAs tend to be very critical of candidates, which makes it impossible for many experienced, active and well-known users to be elected.
In recent years, the Russo-Ukrainian war and political repression in Russia have made it more dangerous to be a member of the wiki community, and even more so to be an admin there; in the last two years (since summer 2022) only two have been elected. Since the start of the war, more than ten administrators (about 15% of the corps) either lost their status through inactivity, abandoned it due to fears for their own safety, or joined one of the pro-Kremlin forks; one was killed in action in the Ukrainian army, and one was designated a "foreign agent" by the Russian government.
In the face of this long-standing severe shortage, the ruwiki community has developed a few mechanisms to spread some of the burden of project maintenance: automation with bots (including some that use machine learning), and unbundling.
Unbundling
editSeveral semi-admin user groups have been created to grant separate admin rights to users who would otherwise be unable to pass a formal request for adminship. Right now, ruwiki has several dozen users who can perform closures at deletion discussions, delete pages, edit protected pages, edit in the MediaWiki namespace, change 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 userscripts connected to an adminbot.
Since 2009, ruwiki has had a group of "summarizers", who have the authority to sum up the results of AfDs. Initially, their powers were very limited, and they didn't even have the technical permission to delete; there was a bot to handle deletion-by-request. Since 2010, they've had the permission to actually delete pages, and since 2012 their powers in AfD have been nearly equal to that of administators. 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 supported a strict hierarchy of users and usergroups, and accordingly objected to the creation of these unbundled usergroups. But over the course of ruwiki's history, the decision to create such groups has been vindicated.
Since 2016, ruwiki has an "engineers" usergroup for technical specialists, who need to edit protected pages — a stronger analogue of the template-editor flag on enwiki — since technically-competent users usually can't pass ruwiki's RfA due to a lack of social skills. Since the establishment of this usergroup, almost all edits on protected templates, MediaWiki pages, sitewide scripts, and sitewide stylesheets have been made by engineers and not admins. When the WMF moved interface administrator permissions to a separate usergroup, it was mostly engineers and not admins who became interface administrators. In fact, this WMF decision caused a huge conflict between the engineers and the old-school administrators – the latter argued that non-admins shouldn't be given higher rights than administrators, while the former proposed that (unlike engineers, who had already proven their competence) administrators be required to pass a JavaScript/CSS proficiency exam to become intadmins. Nowadays, almost all edits to sitewide scripts, styles and system messages are now made by one user, who isn't an admin, but is an 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[2][3].
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[4], 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.
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 1400 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 a Toolforge-hosted 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.
- ^ pageviews.wmcloud.org
- ^ "Did the Ministry of Internal Affairs try to remove data about Kolokoltsev's "offence" from Wikipedia?" (in Russian). REGNUM News Agency. 2018-12-10.
- ^ "The Great Wikipedia Edit War". iStories. 2024-04-15.
- ^ LiftWing is a new WMF vandalism detection ML-based system.
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