Friday, March 20, 2015

Does Wikipedia use artificial intelligence to generate any of its articles?



There are bots that write articles, but usually they are using data from a database to fill in templates. For example, rambot created 30,000 articles for US towns and cities based on US census data. Here's an example from Palo Alto, CA:

The 2010 United States Census reported that Palo Alto had a population of 64,403. The population density was 2,497.5 people per square mile (964.3/km²). The racial makeup of Palo Alto was 41,359 (64.2%) White, 17,461 (27.1%) Asian, 1,197 (1.9%) African American, 121 (0.2%) Native American, 142 (0.2%) Pacific Islander, 1,426 (2.2%) from other races, and 2,697 (4.2%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 3,974 persons (6.2%).

Most people wouldn't call this AI, and I don't think AI is used to generate any articles. It is used to help maintain articles, though. For example, User:ClueBot NG uses machine learning to detect and automatically revert vandalism. It's trained on a dataset of edits that were reverted by human editors.

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