I’m a fan of FOSS and reasonable privacy with data. I also often look for and install software on my computers for random tasks as they come up. Today, when I was looking to install an extension to Firefox called Wikipedia-EN that helps me search Wikipedia by highlighting a word, the Mozilla page for the extension states:
This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.
As someone that is not educated in programming or perpetually current on tech news, what can I do to assess the safety of this and other software? Is there a site that transparently evaluates software and publishes its findings?
Not much you can do other than researching the current consensus. And for the latter you can try to search discussions about its safety. Good query to start with is “is programname malware/spyware”.