Palantir for Wikipedia

Wikify.io is a non-profit research project. We build software tools to analyze Wikipedia: its hundreds of thousands of authors, millions of articles, and billions of edits.

Our goal is to create a monitoring system that works 24/7 and identifies attacks on Wikipedia faster than the most experienced editor.

Mission

Wikipedia was launched back in 2001. Its creators did not assume it would become so popular. It was designed with the idea that volunteer editors could collectively resist various threats. At that time, no one thought about botnets and sophisticated propaganda, and no tools were created to detect attacks. The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, still does not recognize the seriousness of the problem.

We see that complex attacks can go unnoticed for months and years, and involved participants can rise high in the hierarchy of editors. Sometimes the power of the community is not even enough to eliminate the consequences of such malicious editing.

Backstory

In 2019, we uncovered a network of bots engaged in political propaganda in the Russian Wikipedia. Many media outlets, including Meduza ("Revenge of the editors"), released reports about this loud story. Our persistence allowed us to detect the attack, identify all participants and complete the investigation, despite the lack of technical tools.

It took half a year from the start of the attack until the botnet was blocked - too long a period. Cleaning up the articles from malicious edits took even more time.

Wikify.io

In 2021, we began developing Wikify.io - a set of tools for studying Wikipedia, monitoring community activity, and controlling articles. Our goal is not only to detect threats at early stages, but also to understand the development of the encyclopedia's community. We are creating tools not only for ourselves, but also offering them to other researchers.

The long-term plan is to scale the tools to all language sections. In the future, we will build an analytics team that will monitor Wikipedia's health 24/7/365, identify threats and nip them in the bud. We also want to build a team that develops advanced tools for regular editors.

Team

Founder Mikhail Gruznov and backender Danila with experience in editing Wikipedia have been working on the project since the start. At the end of 2022, a frontender Andrew joined the team.

We are potentially looking for a React developer, as well as an analyst or data scientist who knows how to work with data and formulate tasks for development.

We work without bureaucracy: asynchronous workflow, no calls and no micromanagement. Tasks are set in GitHub, all discussions are gathered in one telegram chat. An ideal environment for independent and responsible professionals.

Expenses

We spend about a few thousand dollars each month on development, hosting and additional services. The speed of our development and creation of new tools is limited solely by the budget of our non-profit initiative.

If you would like to participate in our work financially or infrastructurally, please write to wikify-io@wikiganda.org or on telegram @gruznov.