Wikipedia is like salt in the kitchen. Everybody uses the site and fortunately, it comes in handy if you are a student. In campus, we used to copy paste everything we read on Wikipedia after a lecturer leaves an assignment to do. Ignorant of the fact that, not everything on the internet is correct, we still went ahead and copied stuff in our final exams – we failed and supplementary exams straightened our twisted minds.
To make things easier and reliable, Wikipedia launched an automated robot tool for highlighting fake or low quality edits to filter out spam, junk and false edits. The tool is powered by artificial intelligence and it will help people spot false articles on the site.
Wikipedia can be edited by anyone hence reducing it’s credibility. Apparently, Wikipedia receives 10 edits every second and even kids who know their way around Google can edit articles and reports. Wikipedia provides that, the Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) has been designed to act like a pair of X-ray specs. Combining open data and open source machine learning algorithms, the editor can spot article edits likely to be low quality based on the language used and context.
The highlighted sentences and articles will allow an editor make the final judgement after going through an article. The Telegraph reports, many influential people have been misrepresented on Wikipedia. For example, Bill Gates, whose picture was changed to a include a crudely drawn pair of devil horns and mustache, Google’s Sergey Brin, who pranksters claimed was in a relationship with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in 2006, while another edited Tony Blair’s page to state he hung “posters of Adolf Hitler on his bedroom wall as a teenager.”
“By combining open data and open source machine learning algorithms, our goal is to make quality control in Wikipedia more transparent, auditable, and easy to experiment with,” Aaron Halfaker and Dario Taraborelli of the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in a blog post.
Wikipedia is currently the largest online encyclopedia with about five million articles. These articles are viewed every second across the world. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is ranked 7 globally with 3.71 daily page views per visitor and 4:39 daily time on site. The statistics indicates that the website is very popular.
The tool will encourage people to make Wikipedia the primary reference point. Anyway, thanks to Wikipedia I will never use my mind again.
Also read:Google plans to cover the world with limitless 4G internet using Project Loon
