Automatically Labeling Low Quality Content on Wikipedia by Leveraging Patterns in Editing Behaviors

Wikipedia articles aim to be definitive sources of encyclopedic content. Yet, only 0.6% of Wikipedia articles have high quality according to its quality scale due to insufficient number of Wikipedia editors and enormous number of articles. Supervised Machine Learning (ML) quality improvement approaches that can automatically identify and fix content issues rely on manual labels of individual Wikipedia sentence quality. However, current labeling approaches are tedious and produce noisy labels. Here, we propose an automated labeling approach that identifies the semantic category (e.g., adding citations, clarifications) of historic Wikipedia edits and uses the modified sentences prior to the edit as examples that require that semantic improvement. Highest-rated article sentences are examples that no longer need semantic improvements. We show that training existing sentence quality classification algorithms on our labels improves their performance compared to training them on existing labels. Our work shows that editing behaviors of Wikipedia editors provide better labels than labels generated by crowdworkers who lack the context to make judgments that the editors would agree with.