Hi everybody,
2019 is coming to an end, and we want to keep you updated on the current
efforts of the Wikimedia Research team <https://research.wikimedia.org/> on
fighting disinformation on Wikipedia. During the last months we have been
working on understanding the "disinformation eco-system”, its effects on
Wikipedia and what research can do to fight this problem. To that end, we
have done i) a literature review on online disinformation
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.12596.pdf>; ii) a study on how patrolling
currently works on Wikipedia
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Patrolling_on_Wikipedia/Report>
iii) and also discussed with the Wikipedia community
<https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Meetups/Disinformation>about
their interests and priorities on this front. All this has helped us to
understand some of the main mechanisms that are being used today to spread
online disinformation and also what are the actions and technologies that
can help to mitigate this problem.
We have also identified areas that still require more research, both to
better understand the problem of disinformation introduced on Wikipedia,
and new technologies that needs to be developed to be used in the context
of Wikipedia to fight against disinformation. The most relevant areas that
we are going to work during the following months are:
-
Understand how disinformation spreads across different projects: Improve
our understanding on content spreading across different projects and how
this affects the quality of information.
-
Develop / Improve Machine Learning technique to fight
disinformation: Develop
new machine learning solutions to support the editors on content
verification and source credibility assessments.
-
Monitoring social media links to Wikipedia: We are going to create a
social media monitoring system that will help patrollers and admins to
understand some activities on social media that can affect the quality of
information on Wikipedia.
We will be happy to know more about other efforts on fighting
disinformation on Wikipedia, and also to get your feedback about our
research. If you want to learn more about this or other research
projects, please refer to our last research report
<https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html> or contact us.
I wish you a great 2020, free of disinformation ;)
Best,
--
Diego Saez-Trumper
Research Scientist - WMF