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Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia

Posted by kdawson on from the false-positives-would-hurt dept.

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."

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. take your POV somewhere else by H4x0r+Jim+Duggan · · Score: 0, Troll

    Just because the tag exists, doesn't mean you can slap it everywhere you see an edit that doesn't support your world view! You deletionists are ruining Wikipedia for the rest of us. Assume Good Faith!

    --
    Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
  2. Re:Existing by Moryath · · Score: 0, Troll

    Finally, after a rather rude conversation with the human he realized he had no business reverting it.

    And if the editor had been one of wikipedia's "admins", he would have simply gone "ban. lock talkpage." And he'd have gone right on his merry way to abuse someone else.

    Now don't get me wrong though, if someone wants to use a bot to aid in finding vandalism, that would help. But if the system is so frail that Wikipedia cant exist without computer program editors, It may be time to revisit the system. As others have stated, pushing edits into a queue would be much more sane than direct to live edits.

    "Bots" are used for everything these days on wikipedia, and inevitably, they don't work right. The question of whether they "don't work right" so badly that even the one or two sane admins left call attention to it and lock them out, or whether they simply go on doing what they do (some were even programmed by the insane portions of the wikipedia admins to control certain pages), is predicated on the politics of whether a wikipedia admin supports it or not.