Artificial intelligence is used in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for the purpose of developing those projects.[1][2] Human and bot interaction in Wikimedia projects is routine and iterative.[3]

Using artificial intelligence for Wikimedia projects

Various projects seek to improve Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects by using artificial intelligence tools.

ORES

The Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) project is an artificial intelligence service for grading the quality of Wikipedia edits.[4][5] The Wikimedia Foundation presented the ORES project in November 2015.[6]

Detox

Detox was a project by Google, in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation, to research methods that could be used to address users posting unkind comments in Wikimedia community discussions.[7] Among other parts of the Detox project, the Wikimedia Foundation and Jigsaw collaborated to use artificial intelligence for basic research and to develop technical solutions[example needed] to address the problem. In October 2016 those organizations published "Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale" describing their findings.[8][9] Various popular media outlets reported on the publication of this paper and described the social context of the research.[10][11][12]

Bias reduction

In August 2018, a company called Primer reported attempting to use artificial intelligence to create Wikipedia articles about women as a way to address gender bias on Wikipedia.[13][14]

Generative language models

In 2022, the public release of ChatGPT inspired more experimentation with AI and writing Wikipedia articles. A debate was sparked about whether and to what extent such large language models are suitable for such purposes in light of their tendency to generate plausible-sounding misinformation, including fake references; to generate prose that is not encyclopedic in tone; and to reproduce biases.[15][16] As of May 2023, a draft Wikipedia policy on ChatGPT and similar large language models (LLMs) recommended that users who are unfamiliar with LLMs should avoid using them due to the aforementioned risks, as well as the potential for libel or copyright infringement.[16]

Using Wikimedia projects for artificial intelligence

Content in Wikimedia projects is useful as a dataset in advancing artificial intelligence research and applications. For instance, in the development of the Google's Perspective API that identifies toxic comments in online forums, a dataset containing hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia talk page comments with human-labelled toxicity levels was used.[17]

A 2012 paper reported that more than 1000 academic articles, including those using artificial intelligence, examine Wikipedia, reuse information from Wikipedia, use technical extensions linked to Wikipedia, or research communication about Wikipedia.[18] A 2017 paper described Wikipedia as the mother lode for human-generated text available for machine learning.[19]

A 2016 research project called "One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence" named Wikipedia as a key early project for understanding the interplay between artificial intelligence applications and human engagement.[20]

References

  1. ^ Marr, Bernard (17 August 2018). "The Amazing Ways How Wikipedia Uses Artificial Intelligence". Forbes.
  2. ^ Gertner, Jon (18 July 2023). "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth - Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process? + comment". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 18 July 2023. Retrieved 19 July 2023.((cite news)): CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  3. ^ Piscopo, Alessandro (1 October 2018). "Wikidata: A New Paradigm of Human-Bot Collaboration?". arXiv:1810.00931 [cs.HC].
  4. ^ Simonite, Tom (1 December 2015). "Software That Can Spot Rookie Mistakes Could Make Wikipedia More Welcoming". MIT Technology Review.
  5. ^ Metz, Cade (1 December 2015). "Wikipedia Deploys AI to Expand Its Ranks of Human Editors". Wired.
  6. ^ Halfaker, Aaron; Taraborelli, Dario (30 November 2015). "Artificial intelligence service "ORES" gives Wikipedians X-ray specs to see through bad edits". Wikimedia Foundation.
  7. ^ Research:Detox - Meta.
  8. ^ Wulczyn, Ellery; Thain, Nithum; Dixon, Lucas (2017). "Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. pp. 1391–1399. arXiv:1610.08914. doi:10.1145/3038912.3052591. ISBN 9781450349130. S2CID 6060248.
  9. ^ Jigsaw (7 February 2017). "Algorithms And Insults: Scaling Up Our Understanding Of Harassment On Wikipedia". Medium.
  10. ^ Wakabayashi, Daisuke (23 February 2017). "Google Cousin Develops Technology to Flag Toxic Online Comments". The New York Times.
  11. ^ Smellie, Sarah (17 February 2017). "Inside Wikipedia's Attempt to Use Artificial Intelligence to Combat Harassment". Motherboard. Vice Media.
  12. ^ Gershgorn, Dave (27 February 2017). "Alphabet's hate-fighting AI doesn't understand hate yet". Quartz.
  13. ^ Simonite, Tom (3 August 2018). "Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Wikipedia's Gender Problem". Wired.
  14. ^ Verger, Rob (7 August 2018). "Artificial intelligence can now help write Wikipedia pages for overlooked scientists". Popular Science.
  15. ^ Harrison, Stephen (2023-01-12). "Should ChatGPT Be Used to Write Wikipedia Articles?". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2023-01-13.
  16. ^ a b Woodcock, Claire (2 May 2023). "AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart". Vice.
  17. ^ "Google's comment-ranking system will be a hit with the alt-right". Engadget. 2017-09-01.
  18. ^ Nielsen, Finn Årup (2012). "Wikipedia Research and Tools: Review and Comments". SSRN Working Paper Series. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2129874. ISSN 1556-5068.
  19. ^ Mehdi, Mohamad; Okoli, Chitu; Mesgari, Mostafa; Nielsen, Finn Årup; Lanamäki, Arto (March 2017). "Excavating the mother lode of human-generated text: A systematic review of research that uses the wikipedia corpus". Information Processing & Management. 53 (2): 505–529. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2016.07.003. S2CID 217265814.
  20. ^ "AI Research Trends - One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)". ai100.stanford.edu.

See also

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