The Polish Wikipedia community enthusiastically celebrated the website’s 22nd anniversary by taking on an extraordinary challenge – breaking the Guinness World Record for the longest joint editing of Wikipedia. The ambitious goal was achieved on September 26-30, 2023 – uninterrupted Wikipedia editing for 100 hours. The event was organized by the Wikimedia Polska and aimed not only to set a new record, but also to promote Polish Heritage. The previous record was set by Mexican community of Wikipedia users in 2016, editing articles for 72 hours.
Participants of this event had the opportunity to work on articles related to Polish scientific, cultural, architectural, sports, historical, military and ethnographic heritage. Joint editing took place at the Warsaw Public Library – Central Library of the Masovian Voivodeship. Dr. Włodzimierz Lewoniewski also took part in the event.
Wikimedia Polska (@WikimediaPL) broke the Guinness World Record for the longest ever edit-a-thon, by editing @wikipedia_pl for 100 hours nonstop!
The Wikimedia Poland team was inspired by the past record held by @Wikimedia_MX (72 hours). Congratulations, team! Gratulacje! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/zIuvyMzO4A
— Wikimedia Foundation (@Wikimedia) October 6, 2023
This collective effort contributed to enriching Wikipedia with numerous, high-quality entries about Poland. The Wikimedia Polska provided support to the participants, thus enabling the success of this extraordinary initiative.
Concern about the quality of information on Wikipedia is important to ensure its credibility and educational usefulness. Artificial intelligence-based algorithms can make a significant contribution to this process by automatically assessing the quality of Wikipedia articles and their sources. Our department conducts scientific research that allows us to create methods and tools not only for automatically comparing the quality of information between different language versions, but also for enriching less developed language versions of Wikipedia with high-quality information. This is possible thanks to the analysis of large publicly available Wikipedia data sets and the use of open semantic knowledge bases (e.g. DBpedia, Wikidata).
Improving the quality of Wikipedia can have a positive impact on the various websites that use its content. For example, web search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo) may offer more reliable and accurate information in search results. Various news outlets may use well-documented and credible information in their articles. In addition, tools that use large language models (e.g. ChatGPT) can also improve their quality because they draw knowledge from large text data sets, including Wikipedia. Additionally, improving the quality of Wikipedia can help not only reduce misinformation generated by language models, but also identify fake news on social media.
More information about the event: pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rekord_Guinnessa_2023