Context-Aware Detection of Sneaky Vandalism on Wikipedia Across Multiple Languages

The malicious modification of articles, termed vandalism, is a serious problem for open access encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s counter-vandalism bots and past vandalism detection research have greatly reduced the exposure and damage of common and obvious types of vandalism. However, there remains increasingly more sneaky types of vandalism that are clearly out of context of the sentence or article. In this paper, we propose a novel context-aware and cross-language vandalism detection technique that scales to the size of the full Wikipedia and extends the types of vandalism detectable beyond past feature-based approaches. Our technique uses word dependencies to identify vandal words in sentences by combining part-of-speech tagging with a conditional random fields classifier. We evaluate our technique on two Wikipedia data sets: the PAN data sets with over 62,000 edits, commonly used by related research; and our own vandalism repairs data sets with over 500 million edits of over 9 million articles from five languages. As a comparison, we implement a feature-based classifier to analyse the quality of each classification technique and the trade-offs of each type of classifier. Our results show how context-aware detection techniques can become a new counter-vandalism tool for Wikipedia that complements current feature-based techniques.