Future Audiences/Experiment:Add a Fact

Add A Fact is a new experimental area being discussed by the Future Audiences team, looking to understand how generative AI may be used to help people contribute valuable facts and sources to Wikipedia as they browse the web.

This feature builds off the the Citation Needed experiment.

Timeline

The team is currently evaluating ways to test the research questions below in the fastest, lowest-cost way – including via existing tools (i.e., the Citation Needed extension) and/or developing new experimental tools or features.

Research questions

1. Do people on the internet want to contribute good-faith information to Wikipedia?
2. Who are the people who would be interested in doing this? i.e.:
   • The general public – people who have a casual relationship to Wikipedia (are aware of and may visit it from time to time, but wouldn't consider themselves members of our movement, may not donate, etc.)
   • People who are Wikipedian-like in some way – e.g., Reddit moderators, subgroups on the Internet (i.e., fandoms, communities, fact-checkers, etc.); donors
     • What could incentivize non-Wikipedians to do this? i.e.:
       • Add extra incentives: i.e., wrap the "add a fact" functionality into another useful end-user tool, e.g. Citation Needed (if we discover it is useful/attractive to end-users)
       • Radically lower the barrier to entry: i.e., make the functionality run in the background, like spellcheck (checking for and identifying claims that look like they are on reliable sources and should be added)
       • Other?
   • Existing Wiki(p/m)edians
3. How might we deliver these contributions into existing or new pipelines for human review/oversight/addition to Wikipedia?

Overview of previous prototypes/experiments

• WikiGrok (2014-15): on-wiki experiment to encourage casual Wikipedia readers to contribute a structured Wikidata fact to a topic (by answering a simple question about the article they were reading).
  • Findings: high overall engagement and quality of responses (especially when aggregated). Main blocker was in the cost to maintaining/scaling the infrastructure to power suggested questions (at the time, a graph database was the best solution, but there were no affordable, scalable open source solutions on the market).
• Citation Hunt: a game hosted on Toolforge that allows anyone to search for/add a reference to an unsourced claim onwiki.
• Wikidata for Web: an extension that displays data from Wikidata on various websites and also allows extraction of data from these websites to input into Wikidata.