Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia

marpot writes "In an effort to assist Wikipedia's editors in their struggle to keep articles clean, we are conducting a public lab on vandalism detection. The goal is the development of a practical vandalism detector that is capable of telling apart ill-intentioned edits from well-intentioned edits. Such a tool, which will work somewhat like a spam detector, will release the crowd's workforce currently occupied with manual and semi-automatic edit filtering. The performance of submitted detectors will be evaluated based on a large collection of human-annotated edits, which has been crowdsourced using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Everyone is welcome to participate."

Comments

The Art and Science of Wikipedia Vandalism

[MillionthMonkey]

There is an art to Wikipedia abuse. If someone cites a Wikipedia article in some argument they're making, you can always just go to Wikipedia and edit the page so that they're wrong. But that's what a novice Wikipedia vandal does.

A pro knows to edit the article in a very subtle way, so that it looks like the person has poor reading comprehension. Let's say the person cites a Wikipedia article with a sentence like this, in order to support the argument that Colbert is a Democrat.

Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Democrat.[12][13]

This bears the mark of authority, because of the footnote subscripts that are already on it. (We can skip the step where we maliciously relocate them here.)

A novice might change it to this (correctly preserving the authoritative footnote superscripts):

Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert is a self-described Republican.[12][13]

It makes the person appear to be wrong- and the vandalism is obvious- like swapping Eurasia for Eastasia. There's no way he could have misread that.

But change it to this

Although by his own account he was not particularly political before joining the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert has even been described as a Democrat.[12][13]

and the person looks not only wrong, but plausibly wrong because it looks like he can't read. That's what makes successful Wikipedia vandalism an art.

How do you define *Vandalism* ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Case in point --- There is an article in Wikipedia about a certain country.

In that article, they blame their previous British colonial master for everything.

I tried to make some corrections to that article to make it more "neutral", and they changed it back within 10 minutes.

I tried again, and again they changed it back.

For the third time, I was warned by someone from Wikipedia (dunno if it's a volunteer or something) that I have no right to make any correction to that particular article anymore.

The "THEY" in question is the government of that country. They have a "cyber-patrol" group in charge of "online propaganda" and that Wikipedia article is one of their many lies, aka propaganda, they have put online.

Now, how do you define vandalism in this case?