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

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.