Wikipedia has teamed up with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to fact-check its citations.
The online encyclopedia announced that it intends to use Meta’s open-source artificial intelligence program, Sphere, to fact-check its content and confirm citations. This software will scan the referenced sources and display either a failed or passed attempt at information verification.
“This is a powerful example of machine learning tools that can help scale the work of volunteers by efficiently recommending citations and accurate sources,” said Shani Evenstein Sigalov, a researcher at Tel Aviv University and “long-time Wikimedian,” in a statement. “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.”
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Wikipedia has more than 6.5 million articles and 17,000 additions each month. While a staff of volunteers fact-checks the website for truth claims, the sheer number of entries is huge, and the website’s team of editors is struggling to keep up. The incorporation of Sphere is meant to help accommodate these informational needs. Sphere draws on its dataset of 134 million public web pages to draw attention to potentially inaccurate citations. These citations are then reviewed by a human editor for accuracy and changed if necessary.
This AI searching each entry would help editors to expedite the fact-checking process and determine what information is or is not accurate.
The company said it hopes that, by open-sourcing Meta’s Sphere, it will be able to build a more solid foundation for AI training than a private one. It also noted that the foundations of Sphere’s knowledge might be unstable, particularly if it becomes hard to confirm whether a statement is true or false based on the number of times it is posted. “Our next step is to train models to assess the quality of retrieved documents, detect potential contradictions, prioritize more trustworthy sources — and, if no convincing evidence exists, concede that they, like us, can still be stumped,” wrote Meta researcher Fabio Petroni.
Meta has said that there is no financial arrangement established between Wikimedia and Facebook regarding the encyclopedia’s use of its intelligence, according to TechCrunch.
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While Wikimedia is using Meta’s AI for future purposes, the two organizations are not partnering on the project. Wikipedia’s use of Sphere is still in the research stage, according to an update to Meta’s blog post after the initial publication of this article. The AI will also not automatically update Wikipedia’s content.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been expanding its endeavors outside social media. The company has faced additional scrutiny over its handling of “misinformation” and political content. It is unclear if Meta intends to use Sphere at some point on Facebook or any of its other social platforms.
Wikipedia has been taking significant steps toward improving its ability to stay funded. The company announced in June that it had established service agreements with Google and the Internet Archive to receive commercial access to Wikipedia’s content, a first for the nonprofit web company.