A Chinese was admired for her well-written Russian medieval history piece until it was revealed she'd pulled off one of Wikipedia's largest frauds.
A Chinese Female Composed a Lengthy Fake Historical Piece on Wikipedia
Zhemao, who claimed to be a diplomat's daughter in medieval Russia, contributed extensive and authoritative entries to Chinese Wikipedia. According to Vice World News, Zhemao's most extended piece is nearly as long as The Great Gatsby. It described Tartar uprisings in 17th-century Russia and included a map.
In another post, the user provided rare photographs of antique Russian currency from archeologists. Her well-written pieces were well-respected until it was uncovered she'd pulled off one of the platform's biggest scams.
Chinese author Yifan exposed the scam in a Quora-like post. Yifan found one of her articles on a 14th- and 15th-century silver mine while researching a new book. The paper supposedly featured soil composition, mining construction, and silver refining procedures. Yifan sought to fact-check Zhemao's references with Russian speakers, but they didn't exist.
As a reaction, volunteer editors determined that her citations didn't line up or that she manufactured facts from obscure sources. Wikipedia's contributors self-regulate as a crowd-sourced encyclopedia. Wikipedia says its inclusion criteria are "verifiability, not veracity."
Zhemao acknowledged on her profile forging her identity and facts. She said she's not from Russia, and her spouse is Chinese. She's a housewife with a high school certificate, not a doctorate in global history from Moscow State University.
According to Vice's post, she was annoyed by Russian and English stories. She utilized internet translators to interpret web articles, then filled in the blanks with her imagination.
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Wikipedia is the First Client of Meta's Disinformation AI Called Sphere
A new AI-powered tool called Sphere was unveiled on Monday (July 11) by Facebook parent company Meta. It is meant to assist in identifying and dealing with false information, or "fake news," on the internet.
Wikipedia is the AI model's first customer, which is rather appropriate. According to Meta's release, the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia is already utilizing Sphere to scan its pages and indicate sources that don't genuinely support the statements in the article.
According to Meta, it is the first [AI] model that can automatically examine tens of thousands of citations at once to determine if they support the relevant claims.
Meta also said that when Sphere identifies a dubious source, it will also suggest a more reliable one or a revision to increase the entry's accuracy.
The decision follows years of criticism over Facebook's involvement in enabling internet disinformation to proliferate and spread worldwide. Meta's research team said that the Sphere dataset has 134 million public websites. It uses this pooled online expertise to check millions of web citations for factual inaccuracies quickly.
Meta informed TechCrunch there is no cash remuneration from Wikipedia. Meta obtains a large-scale training field for Sphere, while Wikipedia acquires an AI tool that might increase factual accuracy.
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