Facebook has been working to address the problem on the platform since it was accused by users of various types of "fake news" flooding the platform in the past two years. Recently, Facebook parent company Meta announced the launch of an open source tool called Sphere, which can use the huge information base on the open network to help verify the authenticity of the reference sources of various basic knowledge.
Sphere can be used on Wikipedia to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia by automatically scanning entries through Sphere and identifying reliable sources of citations in their entries.
The idea of using Sphere on Wikipedia is simple, the platform currently has more than 6.5 million entries and is adding an average of about 17,000 articles per month. The content on Wikipedia is usually added and edited by users. Although Wikipedia has an editorial team responsible for supervision, as the content gradually increases, the tasks of the editors increase day by day, and it is impossible to review them one by one.
Meta says:
Wikipedia currently has more entries than a human team of any size can examine, so Sphere automatically scans hundreds of thousands of cited sources to find out if a source is adequately supported across the wider web. If a cited source does not appear to be relevant to the content of the article, the model will suggest a more applicable source, even pointing to specific passages that support the claim.
Meta believes that because Sphere has access to much more public information than today's standard model, it can provide useful information that other models cannot. The data that Meta currently uses to aggregate and train Sphere is sourced from 134 million public web pages, and because it is open source, users may tune these algorithms in ways that better suit their own needs. The Meta research team has open sourced the source code of Sphere on GitHub .
While Sphere is developed by Meta themselves, they haven't yet used Sphere on their own platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, which have their own separate tools for managing and moderating their own content.
Sphere is still a project in the research stage, and the recommendations given by the machine need to be verified manually. But the ultimate goal of Meta is to build a platform that can automatically spot problems and quickly fix citations or correct the content of corresponding articles at scale. Meta has not cooperated with Wikipedia for the time being, just using it as a demonstration case.