Wikipedia is a critical source of information for millions of users across the Web. It serves as a key resource for large language models, search engines, question-answering systems, and other Web-based applications. In Wikipedia, content needs to be verifiable, meaning that readers can check that claims are backed by references to reliable sources. This depends on manual verification by editors, an effective but labor-intensive process, especially given the high volume of daily edits. To address this challenge, we introduce a multilingual machine learning system to assist editors in identifying claims requiring citations. Our approach is tested in 10 language editions of Wikipedia, outperforming existing benchmarks for reference need assessment. We not only consider machine learning evaluation metrics but also system requirements, allowing us to explore the trade-offs between model accuracy and computational efficiency under real-world infrastructure constraints. We deploy our system in production and release data and code to support further research.

This paper presents a novel design of the system aimed at supporting the Wikipedia community in addressing vandalism on the platform. To achieve this, we collected a massive dataset of 47 languages, and applied advanced filtering and feature engineering techniques, including multilingual masked language modeling to build the training dataset from human-generated data. The performance of the system was evaluated through comparison with the one used in production in Wikipedia, known as ORES. Our research results in a significant increase in the number of languages covered, making Wikipedia patrolling more efficient to a wider range of communities. Furthermore, our model outperforms ORES, ensuring that the results provided are not only more accurate but also less biased against certain groups of contributors.

Wikipedia plays a crucial role in the integrity of the Web. This work analyzes the reliability of this global encyclopedia through the lens of its references. We operationalize the notion of reference quality by defining reference need (RN), i.e., the percentage of sentences missing a citation, and reference risk (RR), i.e., the proportion of non-authoritative references. We release Citation Detective, a tool for automatically calculating the RN score, and discover that the RN score has dropped by 20 percent point in the last decade, with more than half of verifiable statements now accompanying references. The RR score has remained below 1% over the years as a result of the efforts of the community to eliminate unreliable references. We propose pairing novice and experienced editors on the same Wikipedia article as a strategy to enhance reference quality. Our quasi-experiment indicates that such a co-editing experience can result in a lasting advantage in identifying unreliable sources in future edits. As Wikipedia is frequently used as the ground truth for numerous Web applications, our findings and suggestions on its reliability can have a far-reaching impact. We discuss the possibility of other Web services adopting Wiki-style user collaboration to eliminate unreliable content.

Public transportation is essential in people's daily life and it is crucial to understand how people move around the city. Some prior works have exploited GPS, Wi-Fi or bluetooth to collect data, in which extra sensors or devices were needed. Other works utilized data from smart card systems. However, some public transportation systems have their own smart card system and the smart card data cannot include all kinds of transportation modes, which makes it unsuitable for our study.Nowadays, each user has his/her own mobile phones and from the cellular data of mobile phone service providers, it is possible to know the uses' transportation mode and the fine-grained crowd flows. As such, given a set of cellular data, we propose a system for public transportation mode detection, crowd density estimation, and crowd flow estimation. Note that we only have cellular data, no extra sensor data collected from users' mobile phones. In this paper, we refer to some external data sources (e.g., the bus routing networks) to identify transportation modes. Users' cellular data sometimes have uncertainty about user location information. Thus, we propose two approaches for different transportation mode detection considering the cell tower properties, spatial and temporal factors. We demonstrate our system using the data from Chunghwa Telecom, which is the largest telecommunication company in Taiwan, to show the usefulness of our system.