The Wikipedia deploys more user-friendly AI

The Wikipedia has deploying more user- friendly AI engine to automatically analyze changes to the articles which will improve the quality of the articles and aims to boost participation by making Wikipedia more friendly to newbie editors.

According to Computer Business Review, the AI project is called Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES), and ORES will help in highlighting the potentially damaging edits for the editors, separating vandalism from the genuine edits. If anyone can edit Wikipedia, anyone can mistakenly add bogus information, and anyone can vandalize the site, purposefully adding bogus information. That is why Aaron Halfaker, a senior research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation which is parent company of Wikipedia developed his AI as a way of identifying such vandalism.

Wikimedia said: "Our hope is that ORES will enable critical advancements in how we do quality control -- changes that will both make quality control work more efficient and make Wikipedia a more welcoming place for new editors."

Wired reports that, in one sense this means less work for the volunteer editors who keep watch on Wikipedia articles and it might seem like a step toward phasing these editors out. But this project is actually an effort towards increasing human participation towards Wikipedia. Although some predict that AI and robotics will replace as much as 47% of our jobs over the next 20 years, while others also believe that AI will also create significant number of new jobs. This project is at least a small example of that dynamic at work.

Halfaker aims to boost participation by making Wikipedia friendlier to newbie editors. Using a set of open source machine learning algorithms known as SciKit Learn, which is freely available to the world, the service seeks to automatically identify blatant vandalism and separate it from the well intentioned changes. Halfaker says that service is not going to catch every piece of vandalism, but it can catch the most. "We're not going to catch a well-written hoax with these strategies," he says. "But it turns out that the vast majority of vandalism is not very clever."

Technology Review states that ORES is up to speed on to English, Portuguese, Turkish, and Farsi version of Wikipedia so far. To judge quality of edits and differentiate damaging edits from the innocent mistakes, it uses database generated by the Wikipedia editors while label examples of the past. Halfaker invented ORES in hopes of improving tools that help Wikipedia editors by showing recent edits and making it easy to undo them with a single click.

Wikipedia has implemented strict rules on who could make changes to the major documents to ensure the quality of articles. The new AI will also encourage the newbie editors to make participation in Wikipedia articles using SciKit.