Wikipedia Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) To Combat Decline In Number Of Editors

Artificial Intelligence Aims to Make Wikipedia Friendlier and Better

The nonprofit behind Wikipedia is turning to machine learning to combat a long-standing decline in the number of editors.

Tom Simonite | November 30, 2015

Software trained to know the difference between an honest mistake and intentional vandalism is being rolled out in an effort to make editing Wikipedia less psychologically bruising. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia.
One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000. Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians’ complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers’ mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy (see “The Decline of Wikipedia”).

The Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) is a web service running in Wikimedia Labs that provides machine learning as a service for Wikimedia Projects. The system is designed to help automate critical wiki-work -- for example, vandalism detection and removal. This service is developed as part of the R:Revision scoring as a service project.

By keeping contribution open, but being good at quality control, open knowledge projects maximize productivity and quality -- and this works for large wikis that are well supported by quality control tools (e.g. English and German Wikipedia), but remain a burden for small wikis. ORES is intended to provide a generalized service to support quality control and curation work in all wikis.

Source: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Objective_Revision_Evaluation_Service

<more at http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544036/artificial-intelligence-aims-to-make-wikipedia-friendlier-and-better/; related links: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/ (The Decline of Wikipedia. October 22, 2013) and (Wikipedia: Objective Revision Evaluation Service) and http://www.wired.com/2015/12/wikipedia-is-using-ai-to-expand-the-ranks-of-human-editors/ (Wikipedia Deployes AI to Expand Its Ranks of Human Editors. December 1, 2015)>