BetaWiki:Moderation

The BetaWiki moderation mechanism (provided by the Moderation extension) serves to eliminate vandalism by forcing most contributions to be approved by staff before appearing publicly. It is enabled whenever the wiki is subjected to targeted vandalism attacks.

Moderation process

Contributions from all anonymous editors and registered users who are not automoderated are sent to a moderation queue instead of immediately appearing on the wiki. The editor is informed about this by a "pending review" notice, which appears on the top of the page upon committing. Until the contribution is processed, it can only be seen by staff in the moderation interface, and the original contributor when editing the page.

Staff members are notified about a pending contribution by a yellow notification on the top of the page, which links to the moderation interface. Staff can either approve the contribution, which will make it appear in recent changes and change the actual page content, or reject it, which will move it to the "rejected" folder. A rejected contribution can still be approved within 30 days of the initial rejection. Staff can also mark a user as a spammer, which will automatically reject their further contributions and move them to the "spam" folder.

Rejection criteria

A contribution may be rejected if it contains one or more of the following:

• Spam/advertising
• Vandalism
• Factually wrong information
• New articles that are eligible for quick deletion

In addition, the moderation extension also prevents approving edits that don't change the current page text due to the same change having been already applied before, i.e. when multiple users submit the same change, only a single one can be approved.