Abstract
We present results of a new approach to detect destructive article revisions, so-called vandalism, in Wikipedia. Vandalism detection is a one-class classification problem, where vandalism edits are the target to be identified among all revisions. Interestingly, vandalism detection has not been addressed in the Information Retrieval literature by now. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of vandalism as humans recognize it and develop features to render vandalism detection as a machine learning task. We compiled a large number of vandalism edits in a corpus, which allows for the comparison of existing and new detection approaches. Using logistic regression we achieve 83% precision at 77% recall with our model. Compared to the rule-based methods that are currently applied in Wikipedia, our approach increases the F-Measure performance by 49% while being faster at the same time.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Blanzieri, E., Bryl, A.: A Survey of Anti-Spam Techniques. Technical Report DIT-06-056, University of Trento (2006)
Buriol, L.S., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Leonardi, S., Millozzi, S.: Temporal Analysis of the Wikigraph. In: WI 2006, pp. 45–51. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2006)
Japkowicz, N., Stephen, S.: The Class Imbalance Problem: A Systematic Study. Intell. Data Anal. 6(5), 429–449 (2002)
Kittur, A., Suh, B., Pendleton, B., Chi, E.: He says, she says: Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia. In: CHI 2007, pp. 453–462. ACM, New York (2007)
Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S., Panciera, K., Terveen, L., Riedl, J.: Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia. In: Group 2007 (2007)
Viégas, F.B.: The Visual Side of Wikipedia. In: HICSS 2007, p. 85. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2007)
Viégas, F.B., Wattenberg, M., Dave, K.: Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations. In: CHI 2004, pp. 575–582. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Viégas, F.B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., van Ham, F.: Talk before you Type: Coordination in Wikipedia. In: HICSS 2007, p. 78. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2007)
Potthast, M., Gerling, R. (eds): Web Technology & Information Systems Group, Bauhaus University Weimar. Wikipedia Vandalism Corpus WEBIS-VC07-11 (2007), http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/webis/research/corpora
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Potthast, M., Stein, B., Gerling, R. (2008). Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia. In: Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., Plachouras, V., Ruthven, I., White, R.W. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4956. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_75
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_75
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-78645-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-78646-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)