Wikipedia:Incident Reporting System
The Incident Reporting System (IRS) is a tool being developed by the Product Safety and Integrity team to make it easy for users to find the right path to get help when experiencing a harmful incident.
The tool has now been deployed across the English Wikipedia.
Goals
[edit]For many users, it's been unclear what to do when an incident happens: where to go, who to talk to, how to report, what information to include in the report, how the report is processed, what happens afterwards, etc. Users must know how to flag an issue and where to go to get help. Some do not feel safe reporting incidents because of the complexity of the reporting process or due to privacy concerns. There is also very little information on what will happen once a report is made and what expectations the user should have. The goals of the Incident Reporting System are as follows:
- Make it easier for people who experience harmful incidents to get help.
- Eliminate situations in which people stay silent about incidents because they don't know what to do.
- Ensure people who experience harmful incidents reach the right entities that can help them per community processes.
- Ensure responders are not overwhelmed with invalid reports or issues that belong elsewhere.
Use cases
[edit]As a user looking to get help with a harmful incident,
- I want to be able to indicate the type of the incident I'm experiencing so that I can get help with resolving the issue.
- I want to easily get information about the help resources available that are relevant to the issue I'm experiencing.
- I want to be clearly informed when the help is provided by the community and not the Foundation, so that I can adjust my expectations accordingly.
As an administrator/functionary,
- I want to be able to customize the "support information" step that is presented to reporters, according to the incident they're experiencing and the applicable policies.
Workflow
[edit]Immediate threats of physical harm (processed by T&S)
[edit]- The user can submit a report when they become aware of a situation involving serious risk to their (or someone else's) physical safety.
- Once submitted, these reports are sent to the Trust and Safety team at the Wikimedia Foundation who are responsible for reviewing and responding to such issues.
Any other incidents (processed by community members)
[edit]- Users can select one of the types of unwanted behavior as defined in the Universal Code of Conduct.
- They are guided to a "support information" step that provides clear information on how to get support with an incident of the selected type.
- The goal is to ensure users receive the right support in a way that reflects the needs and practices of the local community.
For each incident type, the community can customize a limited number of content sections with English Wikipedia-specific terminology and links, according to our policies and practices.
Administrators can now set up external links as the destinations for reporting. This allows the use of URL query string parameters such as preload and may make the reporting even simpler and more efficient.
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Incident types
[edit]| 1st-tier category | 2nd-tier category | UCoC provision | UCoC definition, or description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Immediate threat of physical harm (processed by T&S) | Threats of physical harm | — | Intending to commit violence against an individual |
| Threats of self harm | — | Intending to commit an act of harming oneself | |
| Threats of public harm | — | Intending to commit an act of mass violence | |
| Unacceptable user behavior (processed by community members) | Bullying, intimidation, threats or repeated insults | 3.1 – Harassment | "This includes name calling, using slurs or stereotypes, and any attacks based on personal characteristics. Insults may refer to perceived characteristics like intelligence, appearance, ethnicity, race, religion (or lack thereof), culture, caste, sexual orientation, gender, sex, disability, age, nationality, political affiliation, or other characteristics. In some cases, repeated mockery, sarcasm, or aggression constitute insults collectively, even if individual statements would not."
"Explicitly or implicitly suggesting the possibility of physical violence, unfair embarrassment, unfair and unjustified reputational harm, or intimidation by suggesting gratuitous legal action to win an argument or force someone to behave the way you want." "This includes encouraging someone else to commit self-harm or suicide as well as encouraging someone to conduct violent attacks on a third party." |
| Sexual harassment | "Sexual attention or advances of any kind towards others where the person knows or reasonably should know that the attention is unwelcome or in situations where consent cannot be communicated." | ||
| Exposing private personal information (Doxing) | "Sharing other contributors' private information, such as name, place of employment, physical or email address without their explicit consent either on the Wikimedia projects or elsewhere, or sharing information concerning their Wikimedia activity outside the projects." | ||
| Trolling or Hounding (Stalking) | "Deliberately disrupting conversations or posting in bad-faith to intentionally provoke."
"Following a person across the project(s) and repeatedly critiquing their work mainly with the intent to upset or discourage them. If problems are continuing after efforts to communicate and educate, communities may need to address them through established community processes." | ||
| Hateful or discriminatory content | 3.3 – Content vandalism and abuse of the projects | Content vandalism containing "hate speech in any form, or discriminatory language aimed at vilifying, humiliating, inciting hatred against individuals or groups on the basis of who they are or their personal beliefs"
"The use of symbols, images, categories, tags or other kinds of content that are intimidating or harmful to others outside of the context of encyclopedic, informational use. This includes imposing schemes on content intended to marginalize or ostracize" (Hate speech towards an editor falls under "Bullying, intimidation, threats or repeated insults") | |
| Spam or promotional content | Other content vandalism | ||
| Something else | Including 3.2 – Abuse of power, privilege, or influence |
Community configuration
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For administrators looking to customize the "support information" step, Special:CommunityConfiguration/ReportIncident can be used. It relies on Community Configuration, a tool allowing communities to set up and control the configuration of different features. Interface localization text can be found here; requests to change localization text should be made on the talk page, not individual message pages.
Editors wishing to test the Incident Reporting System without accidentally posting reports can also be added as end-to-end testers through the Community Configuration menu.
Updates
[edit]2026: Trial on English Wikipedia
[edit]A trial on English Wikipedia started in May 2026, which will be focused on helping editors report potentially bad behavior, without overloading the system. It will take two months, and start small (visible to 5% of users). Coordination will take place with English Wikipedia functionaries along the way to agree on the right points to expand visibility.
For the last weeks prior to the trial, the team has been working with functionaries to optimize it for English Wikipedia, given English Wikipedia's longstanding policies and processes for dispute resolution. Based on those conversations, a few categories of potentially unwanted behavior have been added. These will only be available on English Wikipedia as they are created specifically for the purposes of the trial. It is now also possible to set external links as the destinations for reporting. This allows the use of URL query string parameters such as preload and may make the reporting even simpler and more efficient. It is available on all wikis where IRS has been deployed.
During the trial, the focus is on monitoring the volume of new reports, checking that reports are routed correctly, and identifying any immediate issues. Coordination will take place with all community members to fix bugs if they arise, and to otherwise streamline the process. For example, the team is exploring some ways to help people more directly submit their reports.
Contact
[edit]
Frequently asked questions
[edit]Is the Foundation trying to change existing community processes?
The plan for the IRS is not to change any community process. The goal is to connect to existing processes.
Is there data available about how many incidents are reported per year?
- The Product Safety and Integrity team has usage data collected on the wikis where IRS has been deployed. The largest of them is Portuguese Wikipedia. However, the volume of data is too low to make predictions based on it. The goal is to address this by launching a trial on English Wikipedia, with the audience similar to the entire audience on Portuguese Wikipedia.
- Beyond the IRS usage data, there is not a lot of clear data that can be used.
- There are a couple of reasons for this.
- First, issues are reported in various ways and those differ from community to community.
- Capturing that data completely and cleanly is highly complicated and would be very time consuming.
- Second, the interpretation of issues also differs.
- Some things that are interpreted as harassment are just wiki business (e.g. deleting a promotional article).
- Review of user conduct/behaviour issues may also need cultural or community context.
- We cannot automate and visualize data or count it objectively.
- The incident reporting system is an opportunity to solve some of these data needs.
How are different types of harmful incidents – such as harassment, threats, or misconduct – defined in the Incident Reporting System?
These terms are being used as defined in the Universal Code of Conduct.
What questions is the team trying to answer with the first version of the product?
Here are the questions to be answered:
- What kind of user conduct/behavior issues do people need help with?
- How many people report the respective kinds of issues?
- How big is this problem?
- Can we get a clearer picture of the magnitude of user conduct issues? Can we get some data around the number of reports? Is user misconduct underreported or overreported?
- Are people currently not reporting various types of user conduct issues because they don't happen or because they don't know how?
- Will this be a lot to handle with our current setup, or not?
- How many are valid complaints compared to people who don't understand the wiki process? Can we distinguish/filter valid complaints, and filter invalid complaints to save volunteer or staff time?
- Will we receive lots of reports filed by people who are upset that their edits were reverted or their page was deleted? What will we do with them?
How does the Wikimedia movement compare to how other big platforms like Facebook/Reddit handle harassment?
While we do not have any identical online affinity groups, the Wikimedia movement is most often connected with Facebook and Reddit in regard to how we handle harassment. What is important to consider is nobody has resolved harassment. Other platforms struggle with content moderation, and often they have paid staff who try to deal with it. Two huge differences between us and Reddit and Facebook are the globally collaborative nature of our projects and how communities work to resolve harassment at the community-level.