Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

's volunteer editor community has the responsibility of

fact-checking Fact-checking is the process of verifying factual information, in order to promote the veracity and correctness of reporting. Fact-checking can be conducted before (''ante hoc'') or after (''post hoc'') the text is published or otherwise dissem ...

Wikipedia's content. Wikipedia has been considered one of the major free open source webpages, where millions can read, edit and post their views for free. This can be both on the grounds of dissemination of misinformation and

disinformation Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It is sometimes confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate. The English word ''disinformation'' comes from the application of the L ...

publications. Therefore Wikipedia takes the effort to provide its users with the best possible verified sources. Fact-checking is an aspect of the broader

reliability of Wikipedia The reliability of Wikipedia concerns the validity, verifiability, and veracity of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition. It is written and edited by volunteer editors who generate online ...

. Various

academic studies about Wikipedia An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, f ...

and the body of

criticism of Wikipedia Most criticism of Wikipedia has been directed toward its content, its community of established users, and its processes. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of the articles, the lack of methodic ...

seek to describe the limits of Wikipedia's reliability, document who and how anyone uses Wikipedia for fact-checking, and what consequences result from the use of Wikipedia as a fact-checking resource. There are several low-quality article types on Wikipedia such as the self-contradictions. These types of articles require improvement and noisy articles can be ruled out. Major platforms including

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

and

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

use Wikipedia's content to confirm the accuracy of the information in their own media collections.

Platforms that fact-check with Wikipedia

Public trust and counter to fake news

Wikipedia serves as a public resource for access to genuine information. One such is the

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

information, where people can rely on the Wikipedia's page for genuine information. Seeking public trust is a major part of Wikipedia's publication philosophy. Various reader polls and studies have reported public trust in Wikipedia's process for quality control. In general, the public uses Wikipedia to counter

fake news Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.Schlesinger, Robert (April 14, 2017)"Fake news in reality ...

YouTube fact-checking

YouTube screenshot demonstrating Wikipedia fact-checking

At the 2018

South by Southwest South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in m ...

conference,

CEO

Susan Wojcicki Susan Diane Wojcicki ( ; born July 5, 1968) is a Polish-American business executive who is the CEO of YouTube. Her net worth was estimated at $765 million in 2022. Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over 20 years. She became invol ...

made the announcement that YouTube was using Wikipedia to fact check videos which YouTube hosts. No one at YouTube had consulted anyone at Wikipedia about this development, and the news at the time was a surprise. The intent at the time was for YouTube to use Wikipedia as a counter to the spread of

conspiracy theories A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.Additional sources: * * * * The term has a nega ...

. This is done by adding new information boxes under some YouTube videos, thereby, attracting conspiracy theorists.

Facebook fact-checking

Facebook uses Wikipedia in various ways. Following criticism of Facebook in the context of fake news around the

2016 United States presidential election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket ...

, Facebook recognized that Wikipedia already had an established process for fact-checking. Facebook's subsequent strategy for countering fake news included using content from Wikipedia for fact-checking. In 2020, Facebook began to provide information from Wikipedia's info boxes into its own general reference knowledge panels to provide objective information.

Fact-checking Wikipedia

Fact-checking is one aspect of the general

editing Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, orga ...

process in Wikipedia. The volunteer community develops a process for reference and fact-checking through community groups such as

WikiProject A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a Wikimedia movement affinity group for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiqu ...

Reliability. Wikipedia has a reputation for cultivating a culture of fact-checking among its editors. Wikipedia's fact-checking process depends on the activity of its volunteer community of contributors, who numbered 200,000 as of 2018. The development of fact-checking practices is ongoing in the Wikipedia editing community. One development that took years was the 2017 community decision to declare a particular news source, ''

Daily Mail The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news websitePeter Wilb"Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain", ''New Statesman'', 19 December 2013 (online version: 2 January 2014) publish ...

'', as generally unreliable as a citation for verifying claims. Through strict guidelines on

verifiability Verify or verification may refer to: General * Verification and validation, in engineering or quality management systems, is the act of reviewing, inspecting or testing, in order to establish and document that a product, service or system meets ...

, Wikipedia has been combating misinformation. According to Wikipedia guidelines, all articles on Wikipedia's "mainspace" must be verifiable.

Self-contradiction articles

An experiment was conducted on detecting self-contradiction articles on Wikipedia using a developed model called "Pairwise Contradiction Neural Network" (PCNN). Contributions to this experiment are as follows: * A novel Wikipedia dataset named WikiContradiction was created which is the first dataset for self-contradiction tasks on Wikipedia. * A novel model PCNN was developed and was fine-tuned via the WikiContradiction dataset. * The empirical results exhibit the PCNN model's promising performance as well as highlight the most contradicted pairs. * The compiled WikiContradiction dataset can be used as a training resource for improving Wikipedia's articles. * This can further contribute to fact-checking and claim verification as well.

Limitations

When Wikipedia experiences vandalism, platforms that reuse Wikipedia's content may republish that vandalized content. Vandalism is prohibited in Wikipedia. Wikipedia suggests these steps for inexperienced beginners to handle vandalism: access, revert, warn, watch, and finally report. In 2018, Facebook and YouTube were major users of Wikipedia for its fact-checking functions, but those commercial platforms were not contributing to Wikipedia's free nonprofit operations in any way. In 2016, journalists described how vandalism in Wikipedia undermines its use as a credible source. Self-contradiction limitations: The two main limitations of the self-contradiction PCNN model are the subjectivity of self-contradiction and not being able to deal with lengthy documents.

References

Further consideration

* *

External links

* Wikipedia:WikiProject Reliability, the English Wikipedia community project which self-organizes fact-checking {{Wikipedia Newswriting