Jigsaw, a group inside Alphabet, and Wikimedia Foundation have joined up to train software to understand and police online harassment. The new initiative is called Project Maven, and it will be run by the nonprofit organization known as Wikipedia Watch. Wikipedia's editor numbers have decreased recently because of an increase in online abuse, which has also deterred engagement from new contributors.
Jigsaw, a group inside Alphabet, and Wikimedia Foundation have joined up to train software to understand and police online harassment. A crowdsourcing service checked for personal attacks in 115,000 messages and produced data that trained machine-learning algorithms, which when run through 63 million discussion posts made by Wikipedia editors found only one in 10 attacks had resulted in action by moderators. Wikipedia's editor numbers have decreased recently because of an increase in online abuse, which has also deterred engagement from new contributors.