Scribe - Helping editors of under-resourced languages to create new high-quality Wikipedia articles
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Wikipedia, one of the most visited and read websites in the world, is a widely used resource to access information about a variety of topics. However, while a few language versions cover a variety of topics, other languages are barely supported. A large part of the world’s population only has limited access to information. This information poverty affects readers of Wikipedia strongly, as they are not able to find information on a variety of topics. To create a more diverse encyclopedia, Wikipedia has to retain new editors and support existing editors in creating articles.
Scribe aims at supporting new editors retention. We tackle some of the challenges newcomer editors face while creating their first articles. From an editor’s perspective, our tools work in the following way: An editor decides to create a new article on a topic of their choice. When starting to write the article, they are able to choose Scribe as a supporting tool. Scribe suggests them a structure of an article, i.e., section headings, and references for the article in the editors’ language.
Scribe is currently being tested on two language Wikipedias in communication with the community - Arabic and Catalan. The project was funded by a Wikimedia project project grant 2019/2020, and consists of a team of two researchers and one software developer.
Find more information on Scribe in our medium blogpost about Scribe.
Wikipedia Reference API
Based on the Scribe project, we created a Wikipedia reference API, aimed to facilitate the automatic detection of misinformation and to help creation of a trustworthy score of news publishers based on their usage on Wikipedia.
Find more information about the Wikipedia reference API in our medium blogpost about the Wikipedia reference API.