With more than 1.29 million articles and counting, Vietnamese Wikipedia is one of the largest and most significant Wikipedia projects in the Asian region. Even so, the number of people holding advanced rights is fewer than before, with just 14 administrators, 2 CheckUsers, and approximately 400-500 active contributors each month. In this context, the community has gradually adapted by decentralizing, automating, and establishing intermediary user groups to maintain the project’s stable operation.

Political concerns severely limited the CheckUser role

In a unique situation, the Vietnamese Wikipedia community has only two CheckUsers, both of whom are founding members of the project and currently residing in the United States. This deliberate choice is a testament to the community’s proactive approach to security concerns, as they have tacitly agreed not to elect CheckUsers who are living in or have Vietnamese nationality, to prevent sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands.

No new administrators since 2022

As of mid-2025, Vietnamese Wikipedia has not had any new administrators since 2022. At that time, five administrators had left their positions in various ways: Alphama (resigned and then removed), Dung005 (removed due to absence), Prenn, TuanUt, and Viotletbonmua (resigned).

Since 2022, the Vietnamese Wikipedia community has faced a shortage of new administrator candidates. The last candidate, NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, was not approved by the community. Until June 2025, no new candidates emerged, until Hide on Rosé entered the race. However, despite receiving five votes in favor, Hide on Rosé’s proposal was met with opposition from the three current administrators. The reasons for the opposition were due to the harsh attitude in communication and the lack of maintenance of activities during his tenure as coordinator, which created a bad impression of stability. Hide on Rosé proactively withdrew from the vote after only four days, illustrating the immense psychological pressure that any candidate must face if they wish to join the administrator group.

During the same 3-year period, two moderators also resigned for different reasons: Q.Khai was removed on November 23, 2023, due to being absent for more than a year, while NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh resigned on December 25, 2024, after a long period of active work in all aspects, including technology and content maintenance.

Although the total number of moderators is still higher than that of administrators, the actual operation still depends on a few active individuals, causing the burden of system maintenance to increasingly fall on a small number of people. Work pressure, high scrutiny, and strict selection criteria make it much more challenging to become an administrator.

Diverging forces

To solve the problem of a lack of advanced users, Vietnamese Wikipedia has divided administrative rights into many specialized user groups:

Moderators (or Eliminators)

Created in 2014, moderators are considered to be half of an administrator, as they can delete, lock, move pages and files, and edit protected content spaces, with neither the ability to block users nor access to sensitive logs.

As of this moment, there are 16 moderators, which is significantly more than administrators, and the majority of daily article maintenance and deletion is now part of a moderator’s responsibilities. The criteria for electing moderators are also more lenient, making them often easier to elect than administrators.

Template editors

Another user group is made to handle high-use templates, which can cause widespread issues if not managed correctly. Therefore, users in this group can maintain these highly protected templates, which are located in the Template namespaces.

Upcoming: AbuseFilter editors

Starting today (July 15, 2025), after 20 days of discussion, Vietnamese Wikipedia will have a new user group: AbuseFilter editors. Members with this permission will be able to view and edit all available filters, including private filters, and will have access to the trigger logs of the respective filters. AbuseFilter is an automated system that detects and blocks suspicious behavior while users are making changes. The filter works by checking modified content against pre-programmed rules. When the filter detects a bad edit, the system can log the behavior, warn the user, remove the edit, or block the behavior altogether, depending on its severity. Creating the AbuseFilter editor’s privilege reduces the load on administrators while leveraging the expertise of non-administrative technical members.

This is not the first instance of sensitive access being granted to non-administrators. In fact, this decentralized model – known as the “unbundling” model – is also in place at Russian Wikipedia, a language version of Wikipedia that is somewhat larger than Vietnamese Wikipedia, with 63 administrators. The ‘unbundling’ model involves distributing administrative tasks to specialized user groups based on their expertise, rather than concentrating all administrative rights in a few individuals. This shows a trend towards decentralization based on expertise rather than traditional administrative roles.

Automation becoming essential

To support management in the context of human resource shortage, Vietnamese Wikipedia has applied machine learning and automation tools, most notably:

AutoModerator

AutoModerator is a system deployed by the Wikimedia Foundation on many projects, including the Vietnamese Wikipedia. The AutoModerator bot, running on this platform, uses a trained machine learning model to detect and roll back potentially harmful edits in the article space. Here’s how it works:

• For each edit in the article space, AutoModerator assigns a risk score based on the likelihood it will be reverted.
• If the threshold configured by the local administrator is exceeded, AutoModerator will revert the edit by doing a “rollback” (undoing all recent consecutive edits by the same user).
• The revert is performed under the name of a system account, and its behavior is identical to that of a regular user: it has a user page, edit history, contributions page, and so on.

Additionally, AutoModerator will never revert edits that fall into one of the following cases: the user reverts their own edits, reverts a previous action of AutoModerator, or edits made by administrators, trusted users, or bot accounts. Thanks to the above limits, AutoModerator can operate stably and safely, minimizing errors and avoiding any impact on reputable users or critical technical control processes.

AutoModerator does not replace humans, but acts as a ‘front line’ in filtering out the most risky modifications, saving patrol time and enabling quick responses to mass vandalism. This significantly reduces the workload on administrators, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks and community management.

Citron – detecting and removing bad weblinks

Citron is a tool developed by Plantaest, an administrator of the Vietnamese Wikipedia. Its purpose is to automatically detect harmful links, such as spam, advertisements, and untrustworthy sites. Every day, the Citron system generates a report identifying suspicious links, which patrollers then review. Each link is rated as either good or bad based on this review, allowing Citron to improve its accuracy over time. Administrators can use these ratings and statistics to add domains to a block list if necessary. Overall, Citron has become an essential tool for reducing the burden of link checking for both patrollers and administrators while maintaining the quality of external links in articles.

Community meetings – small but valuable connections

Despite being one of the largest language versions in Asia, the Vietnamese Wikipedia lacks regular and organized community activities, unlike many other language versions. In its more than two decades of existence, formal meetings have been few and far between, organized primarily by individuals, rather than being regularly or directly sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Most recently, a meeting took place in Ho Chi Minh City on July 7, 2025, with the participation of four members of Bang Toa, Plantaest, Nguyen Huu Dung, and Truong Minh Khai. The meeting took place on a rare occasion when project co-founder Nguyen Huu Dung was on a trip to Vietnam and would then travel to Laos. The meeting took place in an intimate and lively atmosphere, lasting for many hours, with a mix of nostalgia and hope for the future. After the greetings, the members began to share a series of stories accumulated over decades of undercover operations, together dissecting, commenting, and offering constructive perspectives on the project’s upcoming direction.

At the end of the meeting, the participants expressed their appreciation for the Vietnamese Wikipedia community, which continues to be maintained and developed thanks to the silent yet persistent contributions of many volunteers over the past few years. Continuous debate, comments, and feedback, even if sometimes heated, are an integral part of improving the quality of content and preserving the project’s distinctive spirit of autonomy.

The meeting ended on a positive and hopeful note, with participants looking forward to future gatherings that will promote greater opportunities for involvement and diversity. These meetings aim to foster connection and sharing while strengthening our intellectual community—hopefully with a little less drama.

More work than ever

Although the community has around 30 maintainers (including admins and moderators), only a small fraction are actually active. On average per month:

• Only 10 people regularly participate in deleting posts and maintaining content; most of them are moderators.
• The technical, template processing, and filtering areas are primarily handled by a few individuals, who sometimes shoulder the entire technical side for months at a time.
• Only 2–3 admins handle requests on the admin noticeboard page, of which only one is actively handling sockpuppet accounts, namely admin Nguyentrongphu. He is the rare person who regularly monitors troll reports, checks edit histories, compares behavioral patterns, and applies necessary actions firmly yet carefully. In a context where most administrators have withdrawn from handling sockpuppets due to fatigue, fear of conflict, or lack of time, Nguyentrongphu’s perseverance and sense of responsibility are noteworthy highlights in the current preservation activities of Vietnamese Wikipedia.

The story of Vietnamese Wikipedia demonstrates that, despite its small community size and severe lack of administrative staff, the project can still maintain stability thanks to the combination of semi-administrative groups, automated tools, and the persistent efforts of a small but dedicated team. With just a few dozen active members each month, they have been running nearly 1.3 million posts, protecting the platform from vandalism, maintaining high-quality content, and fostering a sense of community spirit – all in a non-profit, volunteer-driven, and challenging environment.