Artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects

The Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) project is an artificial intelligence service for grading the quality of Wikipedia edits.[4][5] The Wikimedia Foundation presented the ORES project in November 2015.[6]

Detox is a project to prevent users from posting unkind comments in Wikimedia community discussions.[7] Among other parts of the Detox project, the Wikimedia Foundation and Jigsaw collaborated to use artificial intelligence for basic research and to develop technical solutions to address the problem. In October 2016 those organizations published "Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale" describing their findings.[8][9] Various popular media outlets reported on the publication of this paper and described the social context of the research.[10][11][12]

In August 2018, a company called Primer reported attempting to use artificial intelligence to create Wikipedia articles about women as a way to address gender bias on Wikipedia.[13][14]

In 2022, the public release of ChatGPT inspired more experimentation with AI and writing Wikipedia articles. A debate was sparked about whether and to what extent such large language models, due to its tendency to generate plausible-sounding misinformation, including fake references; to generate prose that is not encyclopedic in tone; and to reproduce biases.[15][16] As of May 2023, a draft Wikipedia policy on ChatGPT and similar large language models (LLMs) recommends that users who are unfamiliar with LLMs should avoid using them due to the aforementioned risks, as well as the potential for libel or copyright infringement.[16] Online communities expert Amy Bruckman told Vice that she believes that LLM output could be used as a first draft for Wikipedia content, but that such content would have to be scrutinized by a human editor or else it could degrade the overall quality of Wikipedia. She compared potential strategies for remediating low-quality AI content to those for fighting vandalism on Wikipedia.[16]