Artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects

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]

Wiki bots

The most well-known bot that fights vandalism is ClueBot NG. The bot was created by Wikipedia users Christopher Breneman and Naomi Amethyst in 2010 (succeeding the original ClueBot created in 2007; NG stands for Next Generation)^[7] and uses machine learning and Bayesian statistics to determine if an edit is vandalism.^[8]^[9]

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.^[10] 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.^[11]^[12] Various popular media outlets reported on the publication of this paper and described the social context of the research.^[13]^[14]^[15]

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.^[16]^[17]

Generative models

Wikipedia articles can be read using AI voice technology.

Text

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.^[23]^[24] Since 2023, work has been done to draft Wikipedia policy on ChatGPT and similar large language models (LLMs), e.g. at times recommending that users who are unfamiliar with LLMs should avoid using them due to the aforementioned risks, as well as noting the potential for libel or copyright infringement.^[24] Some relevant policies are linked at WikiProject AI Cleanup/Policies.

Other media

A WikiProject exists for finding and removing AI-generated text and images, called WikiProject AI Cleanup.^[25]

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.^[27] Subsets of the Wikipedia corpus are considered the largest well-curated data sets available for AI training.^[19]^[20]

A 2012 paper reported that more than 1,000 academic articles, including those using artificial intelligence, examine Wikipedia, reuse information from Wikipedia, use technical extensions linked to Wikipedia, or research communication about Wikipedia.^[28] A 2017 paper described Wikipedia as the mother lode for human-generated text available for machine learning.^[29]

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.^[30]

There is a concern about the lack of attribution to Wikipedia articles in large-language models like ChatGPT.^[19]^[31] While Wikipedia's licensing policy lets anyone use its texts, including in modified forms, it does have the condition that credit is given, implying that using its contents in answers by AI models without clarifying the sourcing may violate its terms of use.^[19]

References

^ Marr, Bernard (17 August 2018). "The Amazing Ways How Wikipedia Uses Artificial Intelligence". Forbes.
^ 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)
^ Piscopo, Alessandro (1 October 2018). "Wikidata: A New Paradigm of Human-Bot Collaboration?". arXiv:1810.00931 [cs.HC].
^ Simonite, Tom (1 December 2015). "Software That Can Spot Rookie Mistakes Could Make Wikipedia More Welcoming". MIT Technology Review.
^ Metz, Cade (1 December 2015). "Wikipedia Deploys AI to Expand Its Ranks of Human Editors". Wired. Archived from the original on 2 Apr 2024.
^ Halfaker, Aaron; Taraborelli, Dario (30 November 2015). "Artificial intelligence service "ORES" gives Wikipedians X-ray specs to see through bad edits". Wikimedia Foundation.
^ Hicks, Jesse (18 February 2014). "This machine kills trolls". The Verge. Archived from the original on 27 August 2014. Retrieved 18 February 2014.
^ Nasaw, Daniel (25 July 2012). "Meet the 'bots' that edit Wikipedia". BBC News. Archived from the original on 16 September 2018. Retrieved 21 July 2018.
^ Raja, Sumit. "Little about the bot that runs Wikipedia, ClueBot NG". Archived from the original on 22 November 2013. Retrieved 11 April 2017.
^ Research:Detox - Meta.
^ 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.
^ Jigsaw (7 February 2017). "Algorithms And Insults: Scaling Up Our Understanding Of Harassment On Wikipedia". Medium.
^ Wakabayashi, Daisuke (23 February 2017). "Google Cousin Develops Technology to Flag Toxic Online Comments". The New York Times.
^ Smellie, Sarah (17 February 2017). "Inside Wikipedia's Attempt to Use Artificial Intelligence to Combat Harassment". Motherboard. Vice Media.
^ Gershgorn, Dave (27 February 2017). "Alphabet's hate-fighting AI doesn't understand hate yet". Quartz.
^ Simonite, Tom (3 August 2018). "Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Wikipedia's Gender Problem". Wired.
^ Verger, Rob (7 August 2018). "Artificial intelligence can now help write Wikipedia pages for overlooked scientists". Popular Science.
^ Costa-jussà, Marta R.; Cross, James; Çelebi, Onur; Elbayad, Maha; Heafield, Kenneth; Heffernan, Kevin; Kalbassi, Elahe; Lam, Janice; Licht, Daniel; Maillard, Jean; Sun, Anna; Wang, Skyler; Wenzek, Guillaume; Youngblood, Al; Akula, Bapi; Barrault, Loic; Gonzalez, Gabriel Mejia; Hansanti, Prangthip; Hoffman, John; Jarrett, Semarley; Sadagopan, Kaushik Ram; Rowe, Dirk; Spruit, Shannon; Tran, Chau; Andrews, Pierre; Ayan, Necip Fazil; Bhosale, Shruti; Edunov, Sergey; Fan, Angela; Gao, Cynthia; Goswami, Vedanuj; Guzmán, Francisco; Koehn, Philipp; Mourachko, Alexandre; Ropers, Christophe; Saleem, Safiyyah; Schwenk, Holger; Wang, Jeff (June 2024). "Scaling neural machine translation to 200 languages". Nature. 630 (8018): 841–846. Bibcode:2024Natur.630..841N. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07335-x. ISSN 1476-4687. PMC 11208141.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth". New York Times. Retrieved 29 November 2024.
^ ^a ^b Johnson, Isaac; Lescak, Emily (2022). "Considerations for Multilingual Wikipedia Research". arXiv:2204.02483 [cs.CY].
^ Mamadouh, Virginie (2020). "Wikipedia: Mirror, Microcosm, and Motor of Global Linguistic Diversity". Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer International Publishing. pp. 3773–3799. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-02438-3_200. ISBN 978-3-030-02438-3. Some versions have expanded dramatically using machine translation through the work of bots or web robots generating articles by translating them automatically from the other Wikipedias, often the English Wikipedia. […] In any event, the English Wikipedia is different from the others because it clearly serves a global audience, while other versions serve more localized audience, even if the Portuguese, Spanish, and French Wikipedias also serves a public spread across different continents
^ Khincha, Siddharth; Jain, Chelsi; Gupta, Vivek; Kataria, Tushar; Zhang, Shuo (2023). "InfoSync: Information Synchronization across Multilingual Semi-structured Tables". arXiv:2307.03313 [cs.CL].
^ Harrison, Stephen (2023-01-12). "Should ChatGPT Be Used to Write Wikipedia Articles?". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2023-01-13.
^ ^a ^b Woodcock, Claire (2 May 2023). "AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart". Vice.
^ Maiberg, Emanuel (October 9, 2024). "The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes". 404 Media. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
^ Villalobos, Pablo; Ho, Anson; Sevilla, Jaime; Besiroglu, Tamay; Heim, Lennart; Hobbhahn, Marius (2022). "Will we run out of data? Limits of LLM scaling based on human-generated data". arXiv:2211.04325 [cs.LG].
^ "Google's comment-ranking system will be a hit with the alt-right". Engadget. 2017-09-01.
^ Nielsen, Finn Årup (2012). "Wikipedia Research and Tools: Review and Comments". SSRN Working Paper Series. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2129874. ISSN 1556-5068.
^ 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.
^ "AI Research Trends - One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)". ai100.stanford.edu.
^ "Wikipedia Built the Internet's Brain. Now Its Leaders Want Credit". Observer. 28 March 2025. Retrieved 2 April 2025. Attributions, however, remain a sticking point. Citations not only give credit but also help Wikipedia attract new editors and donors. " If our content is getting sucked into an LLM without attribution or links, that's a real problem for us in the short term,"