AI Can Now Help Write Wikipedia Pages For Overlooked Scientists (popsci.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Plenty of prominent scientists have Wikipedia pages. But while checking to see if someone specific has a Wikipedia page is a quick Google search away, figuring out who should be on Wikipedia but isn't -- and then writing an entry for him or her -- is much trickier. For example, you may or may not have heard of Christina Economos. She doesn't have a Wikipedia page about her, although she's a professor at Tufts University and the New Balance Chair in childhood nutrition. But while she lacks a Wikipedia page, she does have a very short stub describing who she is professionally on a website made by a company called Primer. That little blurb, which could one day grow into a full-blown Wiki entry, was created by an AI system dubbed Quicksilver. The idea behind the project is to use AI as a jumping off point. Humans can use it to help them write Wikipedia pages for scientists who don't have them, but deserve to. For example, on Economos' Primer page, there's a link to an article from CBS Boston that mentions her -- a good potential source for a human Wikipedia editor who may want to write an entry for her.

Primer launched officially last year and uses AI to read information and generate reports; part of its focus is doing the kind of work an intelligence analyst might do. Artificial intelligence generally needs data to learn from, and so for this project, Primer used around 30,000 existing scientist Wikipedia pages to train their machine learning systems. Then they fed 200,000 names and related employment information into their AI system. Those names came from the listed authors of scientific papers focused on computer science and biomedical research provided to Primer from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. If you're curious to see a sample, you can head on over to this page, which has 100 examples of AI-generated Wikipedia blurbs.

Comments

Re: Welcome to the circlejerk

[Anonymous Coward]

But the AI have passion for their work...thAI have a purpose!!!! Dammit... they deal with people, who in turn treat them like some dusty computer cloud. Colosus forever!!! Wait...Trump won so Guardian forever!!!

How sad

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Little known scientists need an AI to write a Wikipedia entry about them. Yet there are plenty of humans interested in creating Wikipedia pages about any minor sports personality in all languages. Here for instance, I searched an obcure Belgian soccer player in the Finnish version of Wikipedia and found it.

Sport is clearly more important than science it would seem...

Re:How sad

[DNS-and-BIND]

This just in...little known people are little known. But don't let that get in the way of a good sports bashing on Slashdot. You'll be modded up to +5 in no time.

Re:How sad

[ShanghaiBill]

Sport is clearly more important than science it would seem...

No, not more important, just more popular. But the solution is more articles about scientists, not fewer about sports. It is not a paper encyclopedia, and there is no inherent limit to the number of articles.

Re:How sad

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, Romelo Lukaku is not obscure at all and is one of the best players the Belgian team has ever had. He was often seen as one of Europe's ten best players.
In Europe, soccer is big.

Re: How sad

[alvinrod]

This is hardly unique to sports. Wikipedia (or other specialized wikis) exist for obscure anime, video games, and various other things that are kind of useless, but often have large fan bases without anything better to do.

People just are not as interested in obscure researchers who may not have done any ground-breaking work or have an extensive career behind them.

This just seems pointless and will probably end up with outdated information (since no one cares to make the page to start with) and will likely get vandalized by mischievous students. Then lazy journalists will print these as fact and then Wikipedia has a citation for the bogus fact.

Re:How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

Sport is clearly more important than science it would seem...

No, not more important, just more popular. But the solution is more articles about scientists, not fewer about sports. It is not a paper encyclopedia, and there is no inherent limit to the number of articles.

Going to the PopSci article, this is apparently a gender issue - which brings up some other issues.

I haven't yet seen mention any mention whether or not the woman has given consent to someone or something writing a Wikipedia article about her. I can see some real trouble brewing there.

What if she doesn't want a Wikipedia page? What if she disagrees with the Wikipedia article?

Aside from the article's intent to focus on women, its obvious the same issues can apply to men.

I dunno, a sexist Ai bot writing Wiki pages about women scientists and researchers. That gets cringeworthy real quickly. First problem, is the sex of anyone editing the Wiki article going to be weighted or whole disallowed? I digress though, so let's get away from hoo-hoos or peens.

Regardless my original question still holds. Does Professor Economos want an article? She could easily have a grad student write one if she's focused on her work. Maybe she doesn't want to be there

The AI articles might contain mistakes, irrelevancies, or just stuff she or her department or dean don't want out there. What I've seen of AI doesn't impress me much.

So this whole idea of some bot writing Wiki articles about people who don't have any is just forcing these people onto Wikipedia to edit the mistakes the AI makes.

So we need to see what she wants before forcing her into the world of wiki editing.

Re: How sad

[cascadingstylesheet]

Yes, some sport personalities are more noteworthy than some obscure scientists. So what?

Re: How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

This just seems pointless and will probably end up with outdated information (since no one cares to make the page to start with) and will likely get vandalized by mischievous students.

After reading the article,it is a political thing. The point is to "increase the representation of women scientists on Wikipedia".

But seriously, this is all being done without consent, so starts off on shaky ground.

Is the AI article writer sufficiently non-male biased?

Should the AI article writer be precluded from writing about males?

Transgender scientists?

What about names that are not easily assigned to a sex - we don't want to assume gender.

Silly? You betchya. But if you introduce gender identity politics into science, you will get Gender identity politics demanding control of the science.

Re:How sad

[110010001000]

Um, Lukaku is hardly obscure. He is one of the top 20 currently playing soccer players. In terms of sports he is 100x more famous than any baseball player or American football player.

Re:How sad

[AmiMoJo]

Subjects generally don't get a say in if there is a Wikipedia article about them. There are stricter rules for biographies of living persons, but the existence of an article is governed by the rules on notability rather than the desires of the subject.

Otherwise people whose articles say unflattering things about them, particularly politicians, would get them removed.

Also, if someone were to ask someone else to write an article about them, that would contravene the rules too.

Re: How sad

[epine]

... exist for obscure anime, video games, and various other things that are kind of useless, but often have large fan bases without anything better to do.

Your argument practically writes itself:

Wikipedia lacks articles about important subjects because Wikipedia itself isn't important enough to have them (contributions accruing only from editors "without anything better to do").

This is the most juvenile behaviour known to the human species: pointing to something you find unimportant and screeching "why is that in there, when huge amount of work no-one apparently wants to do isn't in there?" or "why does she get to do it (presumably your sister), when I don't?" WAAAAAAA.

Wikipedia is a volunteer culture, each to their own. It's a bad idea to encourage someone who lives and breathes Power Rangers to contribute to any article concerning planet earth. People on planet earth need to write about planet earth, and those articles will accumulate at a pace dictated by the willingness of those people to contribute their time and expertise (modulo the many momentous distractions of self-importance ...)

Here's another effect: low-importance articles are much easier to write and contribute. BLP is a comparative war zone. Anthology of international border disputes is Hamburger Hill (largely the exclusive domain of Seal Team Six wannabees).

But, but, but—you blubber—the mouth-breathers are terraforming planet Power Ranger at an ungodly speed!

News flash: space is large. Their petty enthusiasms aren't harming anyone else (not very much). And perhaps some of them later grow a life, and become important contributors to important things. I wouldn't be quick to shut down our sandbox half-way houses. Unintended consequences, right?

Bottom line: if you weren't going out of your way to snoop in your older sister's bedroom, none of these shocking parental inequities would have become an issue, in the first place.

Re: How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

Did Marie Curie give consent for her page?

She dead.

Anyhow - here is some sit down truth for you.

Marie Curie is famous not because the is a female. She is famous for what she accomplished. Until the present day, that is

Do you understand the difference? This AI bot that writes Wiki articles is stated to give women more exposure. It isn't necessarily because they are doing world class work, it is because of their sex.

Marie Curie said "I'm gonna find out what the ray emitting substance is in pitchblende - hold my Beer!"

And she collected 2 well deserved frickin' Nobel Prizes for her efforts. She's one of the most incredible scientists ever put on the earth. But today, with pop culturalization as the zenith to aspire to, and the ascendency of gender identity politics, she is more attributed with being a woman than a scientific gift from the cosmos.

Re: How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

Not even necessary to read the whole article to come to that conclusion. After I read blah who should be (vulgo deserves here comes the white knighting) on Wikipedia it was a dead giveaway that this smells of politics of identity politics to be precise. Wah wah women deserve to be treated equally. Women are as good wah wah. Excuse me but who wants to research the ratio of male to female scientists that are active at the moment. Or overall. Ok is guess that gets hard to find out but I bet the ratio is similar to the ratio of male to female scientists listed on Wikipedia.

The female scientists and engineers I worked with hated the identity politics terribly. Getting trotted out for talks when visitors came through because it was suppposed to promote women. As one said to me. "I wanted to be an engineer, and I've become a nerd fashion model."

I think that so many identity politics people don't understand that women who become scientists can't stand being looked at a sex objects by the feminists. And yes, if a woman is looked at as a woman before being looked at as a scientist or engineer, the people who are insisting on that are indeed looking at her as a sex object.

Re: How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

Poor example, as in 1903 Mrs. Curie was originally NOT going to be awarded the prize as she was a woman.

And what about Rosalind Franklin?

Rosalind Franklin - she did not receive a Nobel Prize for a very good reason. She was dead.

In 1958, when she died, DNA structure was not yet proven. After a few more years, in 1962, the Nobel was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins for their body of work on nucleic acid.

Crick had even suggested that Franklin be awarded a Nobel in Chemistry. However, Nobel rules prohibit posthumous awards.

So the good doctor Franklin has been awarded many other honors for her work, including a University bearing her name.

And the sad thing is that this researcher has been elevated to Joan of Arc persecution status by angry feminists who are foaming at the mouth because she didn't get one prize that she was not eligible for because of being dead.

And that's the pity of it all. If y'all have a problem with the Nobel Prize rules, talk to them.

Next?

Re: How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

The rule preventing posthumous awards was introduced in 1974. Crick et al received the prize in 1962. What was your point again?

Doen't matter. Of the 923 Awardees, there are only 2 Awards given out after they were dead. They hate giving awards to dead people. They just made it official.

And apparently you missed everything else > Why don't you read and refute that? I'll wait.

Re:How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

"What if she doesn't want a Wikipedia page?"

If you are famous enough, you get a Wikipedia page like it or not. There certainly are people who wish they didn't have one.

If you are not very famous and complain, you can get your page deleted.

No argument there.

I have also written pages for 3 people (who did not ask me, but I asked them) and maintain one.

Which is why posting anon.

Oooh! could you write an Ol Olsoc page?

Re: How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

. Feminists have reasonable cause to feel aggrieved. But then anyone interested in science or who believes in a meritocracy should also feel aggrieved. Points should make prizes, not penises, unless you can show me that you have to use your penis to hold a test tube over a bunsen burner.

Well now - you are a pretty disgusting sexist there, Well considered that you post as an AC.

I am pretty certain that the only cure you would accept is for a special division of Nobel prizes exclusively for women.

At that point, your utter fixation on the specific genitalia a person is wielding might be assuaged.

After that we can consider Nobel prizes only for gay people, trans people (would male to female and female to male be the rule, or would one encompassing group be okay?)

A meritocracy based on what is between people's legs, and how they mentally define who they want to have sex with. In the race to eliminate sexism, y'all have become more focused on sex than your enemies. You have become your enemy.

Re: How sad

[Ol Olsoc]

Gender identity politics was very much present in science in the past, and led to a failure to recognise female scientists.

Of that, there is no doubt. But eventually, we have to move on. the best way to eliminate 'isms is to do good work.

The horse has bolted the stable, and has probably led a full life and gone to the knacker's yard by now. Thankfully there is now less discrimination.

The problem with activist groups is that they tend to want to remain activist. After achieving their goals, they tend to overreach, or move the goalposts. Mothers against Drunk Driving is an example. After quite a bit of success in getting legislation passed, they continued, to the point of a BAC that isn't drunk is considered DUI. Around here, after the new laws were passed, MADD started sporting "Impairment Starts With the First Drink" stickers.

They had become prohibitionists rather than say "We did it!" and folded the tents.

We are seeing the overreach occurring in third wave feminism, which has abandoned the concept of the strong capable female, and substituted the idea of the weak but superior woman, the woman who can command the world, yet who can be terribly damaged if a man winks at her. The woman who needs to give consent for a man to speak to her. This is like some mutated Victorian ethos.

I wouldn't be opposed to the good professor getting a Nobel Prize. But the whining about it and attributing it to those evil misogynistic men is just part of the overreach.

I do know the female Engineers and scientists I worked with and were friends with actually molded my opinions on this. To a person, they loathed modern feminism. My own views are still more liberal than theirs. Also to a person, they said that they got more pushback and abuse from other women. My spouse who isn't an engineer, but a suit, concurs.

When did wikipedia become a place to post resumes?

[Fly Swatter]

I thought it was supposed to be like an encyclopedia, not facebook and linked-in.

Re:When did wikipedia become a place to post resum

[dgatwood]

This. I predict a week later, these will get auto-deleted by a bot for being insufficiently noteworthy. And thus will begin the first AI-powered edit war.

Way to lower Wikipedia's quality

[guacamole]

Now AI is going to trash Wikipedia with useless stub articles based on information you can google within 10 seconds That's just what we need.

Re:Way to lower Wikipedia's quality

[The Original CDR]

Wikipedia will need more than one AI to peer review each other's pages and make the pages authoritative in the underwear sniffing department.

Can vs Should

[dohzer]

Sure they can, but should we let them?

automating what shouldn't be

[doom]

I'm not a huge fan of Jimmie Wales, but one thing he said made a lot of sense to me-- he commented that at wikipedia they're continually at war with programmers who want to automate things that are better done by a human being... e.g. it's easy enough to send a standard welcome message to every newbie, but because it's a standard message it doesn't mean very much, and it's better to have a culture where actual human beings decide to send out welcome messages...

Automatically generating pages for subjects that a human being couldn't be bothered with sounds like an idea that is perhaps not quite as dumb as letting people vote by cellphoe, but it's getting there.

Re:automating what shouldn't be

[bluegutang]

For some things, automatic pages are appropriate.

There is a guy who has "written" 2.7 million Wikipedia pages. For example, he created a page for every single bird species where the pages don't already exist. That's OK because the basic information for each species is pretty formulaic - English name, Latin name, classification, habitat perhaps. Once the page exists, humans can add more "interesting" info if they have any.

This method doesn't work well for other topics, like people.

Re:automating what shouldn't be

[Kjella]

This method doesn't work well for other topics, like people.

Well it works for some people, for example if you say that everyone who's won an Olympic medal is a notable athlete, everyone who's won an Oscar is a notable actor, everyone that's won a Nobel prize is a notable... something, everyone in Congress is a notable politician and so on. Of course you're just then moving the discussion from the individuals to the qualifying criteria, because there's a lot of crappy competitions and awards and prizes and local politics where you're at most notable to a very limited crowd.

If a Wikipedia page pops up in the forest...

[MDMurphy]

..is it visible?

So this AI bot creates a Wikipedia page ( barely a snippet from what I saw ) from already accessible information. Is there going to be another bot trolling Wikipedia to find pages to link to this page? How will it fold the link in context? Because if no other Wikipedia page links to it people won't find it within Wikipedia without explicitly searching for it. And since no pages link to it, and it contains the same content as the easily discoverable original page it's going to be low ranked and redundant.

Maybe, just maybe, it might be worth it if the bot could crawl Wikipedia and find the red links to people that are already mentioned in other pages but have no page of their own. At least those people are already on Wikipedia after a fashion and there will be at least one link to the new bot-created page.

Tiny pages with no incoming links have little to no value. The bot might be able to compose a tiny page, but so could any person in minutes after assessing if the page will have value. We need to asses for value first, create the page after.

It Serves Feminism, not Science or Wikipedia

[Kunedog]

From TFA:

Another aspect of the project is to make it easier for scientists who are women to get the representation they deserve on Wikipedia—to empower human editors “to close the gender gap in representation of women in science,” Bohannon says. One of the ways that can happen is if a group wants to create more Wikipedia pages with a focus on women scientists, they could use data from Quicksilver, which Bohannon points out is filternable by gender.

This is yet another sexist politically-motivated project, not one that genuinely cares about scientific merit or improving Wikipedia.

Re:It Serves Feminism, not Science or Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Equality, like feminism, has two modern meanings. The polite one when anyone asks what the definition is, and what is practiced. Both now seek a future where women, regardless of merit, are treated better than men in every context.

None of these efforts end even when women do better. There's still thousands of women-only scholarships and tens of thousands of programs to get more women to go to college and give them support when they are there despite being the majority of students and graduates by a large and increasing margin. Not one feminist or person for equality lifts a finger "to close [that] gender gap."

It's all pathetic, evil, doublespeak.

More importantly...

[bluegutang]

Can AI delete Wikipedia pages for non-notable scientists who write themselves a page in order to promote themselves?

Re:More importantly...

[Daralantan]

A few years ago I used to know a guy in college who was part of the RC Patrol on Wikipedia. He often would show me hilarious and dumb vandalism/trolling on Wikipedia articles.

One thing I always remember about it though is that they frequently had articles for various Indian guys who were just... office workers.? Maybe some minor programmers, but none of them had any kind of notable achievements. These articles put up daily about these guys whose names showed up pretty much nowhere on the Internet.

Just for scientists?

[dromgodis]

Why would this method be limited to scientists? Couldn't it be asked to write up a bio of anyone?

Re:Just for scientists?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was specifically trained to pull bio information out of research papers and most likely uses citation count or the text of articles that cite the author's work in order to determine the most influential topics written by the author.

I met many prominent scientists in my life...

[LordHighExecutioner]

...and they are probably very happy of not having a wikipedia page. They are better known in their field thanks to the work they did, the students they taught, and the papers they published on international journals. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice

Privacy?

[petes_PoV]

Then they fed 200,000 names and related employment information into their AI system.

Before doing this, I sincerely hope Primer got written permission from those "overlooked" scientists.

One reason for not having a Wiki page is because they don't actually want one. Not everybody is a self-promoting narcissist.

Re:Privacy?

[Kazoo the Clown]

If it happens to me, I'm changing my name to "F***K Wikipedia"...

Ah

[cascadingstylesheet]

So the "problem" is that a woman professor somewhere didn't already have a Wikipedia article about her. Oy.

How do you define 'deserves'.

[fish_in_the_c]

I kind of thought the idea of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia was that the community decided which topics were important ( aka deserved) to be covered and then wrote about them.

So ok the AI can write a bio, but does a person decide who 'deserves' one? If you don't know anything about them how would you decide that? If you know something about them , why not write that?

Needs work but very cool

[Anonymous Coward]

"Auriel A Willette is affiliated with Iowa State University.[1]He specializes in food science and human nutrition.[2]He is a member of Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition.[1]

Willette’s work focused on an area of the brain — the medial temporal lobe and specifically the hippocampus — that is critical for learning new things and sending information to long-term memory.[3]She and Webb analyzed anxiety and motor function using the Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale – a tool that measures progression of the disease."
>He specializes in food science and...
>She and Webb analyzed anxiety and...
are they male or female??

"Adam Boyko, Ph.D., is a dog geneticist at Cornell University who created Embark, sort of the Cadillac of doggy DNA tests.[4]He served as a Research Associate in the Genetics Department at the Stanford School of Medicine before beginning his faculty appointment at Cornell in 2011."
>Embark, sort of the Cadillac of doggy DNA tests
improper language, but i guess useful enough for a human to use when writing a wikipedia article

"“Early detection is key,” Grammer wrote on Instagram, captioning a photo of herself at Cedars-Sinai hospital smiling next to her “amazing” surgeon Dr. Beth Karlan. I just feel my responsibility as a cancer survivor to go out there and let people know what the symptoms are for ."
missing quotations for the last bit of what they said

I would like AI to one day read books or produce summaries/shortened versions of text using a similar system

sibling-envy boo birds

[epine]

Belated subject line to my previous post: sibling-envy boo birds.

What if...

[Kazoo the Clown]

What if a scientist DOESN'T WANT a Wikipedia entry? Who do they sue to keep their name out of such things?

she does have a very short stub

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

Hey, hey, hey! That's a bit harsh, don't you think?