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/Disinformationabout 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:

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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,

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Diego Saez-Trumper

Research Scientist - WMF