Hey everybody,
TL;DR: I wanted to let you know about an upcoming experimental Reddit AMA ("ask me anything") chat we have planned. It will focus on artificial intelligence on Wikipedia and how we're working to counteract vandalism while also making life better for newcomers.
We plan to hold this chat on June 1st at 21:00 UTC/14:00 PST in the /r/iAMA subreddit[1]. I'd love to answer any questions you have about these topics questions, and I'll send a follow-up email to this thread shortly before the AMA begins.
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For those who don't know who I am, I create artificial intelligences[2] that support the volunteers who edit Wikipedia[3]. I've been fascinated by the ways that crowds of volunteers build massive, high quality information resources like Wikipedia for over ten years.
For more background, I research and then design technologies that make it easier to spot vandalism in Wikipedia—which helps support the hundreds of thousands of editors who make productive contributions. I also think a lot about the dynamics between communities and new users—and ways to make communities inviting and welcoming to both long-time community members and newcomers who may not be aware of community norms. For a quick sampling of my work, check out my most impactful research paper about Wikipedia[3], some recent coverage of my work from *Wired*[4], or check out the master list of my projects on my WMF staff user page[5], the documentation for the technology team I run[9], or the home page for Wikimedia Research[8].
This AMA, which I'm doing with with the Foundation's Communications department, is somewhat of an experiment. The intended audience for this chat is people who might not currently be a part of our community but have questions about the way we work—as well as potential research collaborators who might want to work with our data or tools. Many may be familiar with Wikipedia but not the work we do as a community behind the scenes.
I'll be talking about the work I'm doing with the ethics of AI and how we think about artificial intelligence on Wikipedia, and ways we’re working to counteract vandalism on the world’s largest crowdsourced source of knowledge—like the ORES extension[6], which you may have seen highlighting possibly problematic edits on your watchlist and in RecentChanges.
I’d love for you to join this chat and ask questions. If you do not or prefer not to use Reddit, we will also be taking questions on ORES' MediaWiki talk page[7] and posting answers to both threads.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence 2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES 3. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfak... 4. https://www.wired.com/2015/12/wikipedia-is-using-ai-to-expand-the-ranks-of-h... 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Halfak_(WMF) 6. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ORES 7. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:ORES 8. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research 9. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Scoring_Platform_team
-Aaron Principal Research Scientist @ WMF User:EpochFail / User:Halfak (WMF)