Wikipedia Partners with Meta for Open-Sourced AI to Fact Check New Entries

The world’s largest open-access encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is officially teaming up with Meta AI to fact-check citations as the size of entries continues to rise. Though article growth peaked around 2010, the size of individual articles has continued to grow as time has gone on. This has resulted in the need for more citations and in-house moderation.

The partnership will see Wikipedia utilizing Meta’s open-sourced artificial intelligence program known as Sphere, to fact-check content and confirm citations. According to the press release Meta AI released via its blog Tech at Meta, the AI program Sphere will scan information from citations and reference sources. From there it will indicate a pass or fail result depending on if the information presented could be verified.

With over 6.5 million articles and over 17,000 additions added each month, the staff of volunteer fact-checkers is overwhelmed due to the volume of content. This is where the partnership with Meta’s Sphere comes into play. The AI is designed to assist these teams by drawing on its dataset of 134 million public webpages to point out potentially inaccurate citations so Wikipedia’s team of volunteers can focus where they’re needed.

Shani Evenstein Sigalov, vice-chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees explains, “This is a powerful example of machine learning tools that can help scale the work of volunteers by efficiently recommending citations and accurate sources. Improving these processes will allow us to attract new editors to Wikipedia and provide better, more reliable information to billions of people around the world. I look forward to continued improvements in this area, especially as machine learning tools can provide more customized citations and multilingual options to serve our Wikimedia communities across more than 300 languages.“

This isn’t just another example of harassing the power of AI to enhance human capabilities. With Wikipedia’s wealth of text-based information, having an AI program understand the nature and relationship between complex text passages, as seen in Wikipedia entries, and their citations can help the research community at large advance AI towards more efficient and smarter systems.

If successful, this could be a step forward in NLP. Giving these programs a greater ability to tackle complexity and nuanced text-based information.