Meta wants to fix Wikipedia with artificial intelligence

Wikipedia has become, over the years, one of the most used sources of information in the world. More than 6,458 million entries in English, more than 1,755 million in Spanish, and equally monstrous figures in other languages ​​are the work of an army of tens of thousands of collaborators who, altruistically, decide to make contributions of all kinds to the encyclopedia that practically ended the encyclopedias.

The problem, and this is a recurring theme, is that Not everyone edits Wikipedia with good intentions. From the joker who decides to introduce false or joke elements “for laughs”, to cases as bloody as Zhemao, we are reminded from time to time that we should not take all the information reflected in Wikipedia as reliable. Rather, we should be wary and check, whenever possible, the references included in the articles, and look for alternative sources of information when we read the “Citation required” indicator.

The problem is that many users use Wikipedia as the only source and, in any case, check if there are links that point to the original sources, but do not open and review them. This has given rise, over time, to links to supposed sources are added that, in reality, do not confirm the information outlined in Wikipedia. Why? Because whoever does it knows that the vast majority of users will never get to review them.

Meta is aware of this problem and wants to help the Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for Wikipedia, to solve it with a solution that, at least at first, seems like a good idea. As we can read in Digital Trends, Meta wants to design an AI that checks the citations of Wikipedia posts. A very complex challenge, yes, since artificial intelligence must be able to understand the text “endorsed” by the reference, as well as the reference itself, to confirm that there is indeed a relationship between the two.

Even more interesting, although also more complex and further away in time, we find two other points in the proposal: the possibility that AI find better references that those cited in the articles and add them to them, and that in addition to using texts as sources, can also be based on multimedia files. To this end, of course, you should be able to analyze them and draw conclusions about their content.

If this system works well, Wikipedia could finally have a system for reviewing, correcting and expanding references, something that would substantially improve the reliability of its entries. If Meta manages to complete this system and its operation is adequate, it will have been scored a dot that could add a few integers to your image.