How to identify fake news on Wikipedia

On April 22-24, in the Upper Silesian Ethnographic Park in Chorzów, the conference “Wikimedians Spring Meetup 2022” was held. The event consisted of lectures, training sessions, workshops, work on project issues for people editing Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia, Wikidata and others). The conference was organized by the Polish public benefit organization “Wikimedia Polska”.

During the conference, Dr. Włodzimierz Lewoniewski gave a presentation entitled “How to identify fake news on Wikipedia? Good practices, tools and possibilities of automation“, in which he discussed the problems related to the quality of information in multilingual Wikipedia and showed the results of our department’s scientific research on the issue of automatic evaluation of the quality of articles in this encyclopedia, including the evaluation of the reliability of information sources.

During the speech, there was also a discussion on how Wikipedia editors struggle with disinformation. This discussion not only allowed the exchange of knowledge about good practices of identifying false facts in Wikipedia articles, but also can help in the creation of methods and tools to improve and automate this process.

This topic is especially important in the context of the development of methods of creating and disseminating fake news. At the same time, Wikipedia can be more and more often considered as the target medium of such undertakings – everyone can edit the content there. Artificial intelligence algorithms may be included in the disinformation process, which causes, inter alia, increasing the amount of disseminated false content. This can be a growing challenge for Wikipedia users who care about the quality of the articles in this encyclopedia and undo (or correct) inappropriate edits. Each subsequent detection of untrue information by wikipedists can create a specific “scheme of conduct” that can potentially be improved (automated) with the use of various algorithms.

Conference website: pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wzlot