Cross Language Prediction of Vandalism on Wikipedia Using Article Views and Revisions

Vandalism is a major issue on Wikipedia, accounting for about 2% (350,000+) of edits in the first 5 months of 2012. The majority of vandalism are caused by humans, who can leave traces of their malicious behaviour through access and edit logs. We propose detecting vandalism using a range of classifiers in a monolingual setting, and evaluated their performance when using them across languages on two data sets: the relatively unexplored hourly count of views of each Wikipedia article, and the commonly used edit history of articles. Within the same language (English and German), these classifiers achieve up to 87% precision, 87% recall, and F1-score of 87%. Applying these classifiers across languages achieve similarly high results of up to 83% precision, recall, and F1-score. These results show characteristic vandal traits can be learned from view and edit patterns, and models built in one language can be applied to other languages.