Wikipedia has used its first
“artificially intelligent” editor to flush out suspicious alterations made to
the online encyclopedia by politicians, companies and powerful people.
The new AI editor has been developed to
help Wikipedia’s dwindling ranks of human editors root out suspicious edits
among the 500,000 that are made every day.
The objective revision evaluation
service, or ORES, directs human editors to what it detects as “damaging”
changes to Wikipedia entries. The human editors can assess the amendment and
take action, which might involve banning the person who made it.
More than 45 million edits have been
processed by ORES, which works in 14 languages.
In October, founder Jimmy Wales said Wikipedia
would boost its ranks of volunteer editors to fight back against spin. He said
he was “not going to let Wikipedia become a PR platform” as it would be
“against all of our values”.
Tens of thousands of volunteers edit
Wikipedia, which has more than tripled to 4.5 million pages in the past eight
years.
However, over that period, the number of
active editors on the English version has fallen from a peak of 55,000 to about
30,000.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the
not-for-profit organisation that oversees Wikipedia, is trying to attract new
volunteers by making the editing process easier.
The foundation said: “ORES functions
like a pair of X-ray specs ... these specs actually work to highlight
potentially damaging edits for editors.
This allows editors to triage them from
the torrent of new edits.”
By James Dean
With many thanks to The Australian
