October 23, 2018

How Artificial Intelligence Helps Wikipedia to Get Better

Artificial Intelligence is a phenomena that is said to have the potential to revolutionize the world. It is a term that refers to the idea of making machines that can think like us humans. As machines function with more accuracy and speed than humans, they can be much more productive than humans if they could think. This will save a lot of time and make things more convenient. Wikipedia has recently started to use Artificial Intelligence to improve the functionality of the site.

As we all know that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that allows all of its users to edit the available information. The site values credibility and this is why it allows the readers to challenge and correct any available information. Not only that, but the site also have a policy of deleting the information contributed by any of the editors if it is found to be incorrect or controversial. Moreover, it also often deletes the accounts or even blocks the IP addresses of the editors who are found to be involved any activities that go against the many rules of Wikipedia.

Since Wikipedia is ran by the volunteers mostly and it is a huge site, things sometimes become really complicated. Some volunteers learn how to create a Wikipedia page from the internet and do not bother reading the rules for writing on the site. This leads their page to get deleted soon. However, sometimes the editors do not make a mistake deliberately and yet, they are blocked because someone reported them.

To resolve issues like these, Wikimedia foundation, a nonprofit support for Wikipedia, came up with the solution of using Artificial Intelligence to improve the site. There are many other problems that can be resolved with Artificial Intelligence. This article is going to discuss how Wikipedia is using artificial intelligence to improve itself.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Identify Abusive Comments

To improve the environment of the platform by eliminating users who are abusive towards others, Wikipedia collaborated with Wikimedia Foundation and Jigsaw, which is a tech incubator. The project was designed to flag comments that are inappropriate or personal attacks. This project trained machine learning algorithms to detect abuse by using 100,000 toxic comments that were posted on Wikipedia Talk pages. These comments were identified by humans as toxic and each comment was reviewed by 10 humans.

Artificial Intelligence for Addressing Deserving Scientists

There are many scientists who are prominent in their field and have a Wikipedia page of their own. However, some of the recent scientists who are not popular among general public do not have a Wikipedia page. Artificial intelligence is also used for identifying such deserving scientists and create a draft entrée on the website that can be later edited by any of the volunteer editor who come across it. The software that is used to find out the missing scientists from the Wikipedia basically go through scientific citations and news to pick up the information and the names of the scientists who have any renown contribution in their field. The system is designed to differentiate between two people with same names and rectify the information.

Gender bias and Wikipedia

Wikipedia biographies include biographies of 80% men. Also, 80% of wiki editors are men. This was a one of the major problems for the site and it wanted to resolve this underrepresentation of women. Artificial Intelligence is also useful for identifying the contribution of the women specifically in the fields of science and technology and add wiki drafts for them. The software is not supposed to replace the human editors but rather it is to make the work easier for the editors. Finding a missing scientist’s name who does not have a Wikipedia page and then creating a page is very difficult for the editors. However, with drafts that are created by the software by filtering tons of information available on the internet, it is easier to include the deserving names to the site.