Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism

Abstract

Collaborative online social media (CSM) applications such as Wikipedia have not only revolutionized the World Wide Web, but they also have had a hugely positive effect on modern free societies. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has also become target to a wide-variety of vandalism attacks. Most existing vandalism detection techniques rely upon simple textual features such as existence of abusive language or spammy words. These techniques are ineffective against sophisticated vandal edits, which often do not contain the tell-tale markers associated with vandalism. A plethora of methods have been developed within the Wikipedia and the scientific community to tackle this problem.This project has participated in this effort and proposes a content context-aware vandalism detection framework. The main idea is to quantify how well the words contained in the edit fit into the topic and the existing content of the Wikipedia article.