Wikipedia Revision Scoring as a Service
In this interview with [Aaron Halfaker](http://halfaker.info/) of the Wikimedia Foundation, we discuss his research and career related to the study of Wikipedia. In his paper [The Rise and Decline of an open Collaboration Community](https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/), he highlights a trend in the declining rate of active editors on Wikipedia which began in 2007. I asked Aaron about a variety of possible hypotheses for the phenomenon, in particular, how automated quality control tools that revert edits automatically could play a role. This lead Aaron and his collaborators to develop [Snuggle](http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Snuggle/), an optimized interface to help Wikipedians better welcome new comers to the community.
We discuss the details of these topics as well as [ORES](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Objective_Revision_Evaluation_Service), which provides [revision scoring as a service](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revision_scoring_as_a_service) to any software developer that wants to consume the output of their machine learning based scoring.
You can find Aaron on Twitter as [@halfak](https://twitter.com/halfak).
Guest
Aaron Halfaker: Aaron Halfaker is a principal applied research scientist working in the Office of Applied Research in Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices organization. He is also a Senior Scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Halfaker’s research explores the intersection of productive information work and the application of advanced technologies (AI) to support productivity. In his systems building research, he’s worn many hats from full stack engineer, ethnographer, engineering manager, UX designer, community manager, and research scientist. He’s most notable for building an open infrastructure for machine learning in Wikipedia called ORES. His research and systems engineering have been features in the tech media including Wired, MIT Tech Review, BBC Technology, The Register, and Netzpolitik among others. Dr. Halfaker reviews and coordinates for top-tier journals in the social computing and human center-AI space including ACM CHI, ACM GROUP, ACM CSCW, Transactions on Social Computing, WWW, and JASIST.