100 hours of continuous Wikipedia editing
The ambitious goal was achieved between September 26-30, 2023. On February 7, 2024, the Guinness Office of Records officially awarded the title for the longest Wikipedia editing marathon. The event was organized by the Wikimedia Polska Association and aimed not only to set a new record, but also to promote Polish Heritage. The previous record was set by Mexican Wikipedia users in 2016, editing articles for 72 hours.
Participants of this event had the opportunity to work on articles related to Polish scientific, cultural, architectural, sports, historical, military and ethnographic heritage. Joint editing took place at the Warsaw Public Library – Central Library of the Masovian Voivodeship. According to the organizers, 127 editors took part in the event, including Dr. Włodzimierz Lewoniewski. Additionally, additional volunteers helped support the event. 13.1 thousand were recorded in 100 hours. editions in 9.5 thousand articles on the Polish-language Wikipedia. 293 new articles were also created during this time. This collective effort contributed to enriching Wikipedia with numerous, high-quality entries about Poland. The Wikimedia Polska Association provided support to the participants, thus enabling the success of this extraordinary initiative.
Concern about the quality of information on Wikipedia is important to ensure its credibility and educational usefulness. Artificial intelligence-based algorithms can make a significant contribution to this process by automatically assessing the quality of Wikipedia articles and their sources. The Department of Information Systems conducts scientific research that allows for the creation of methods and tools not only for automatically comparing the quality of information between different language versions, but also for enriching less developed language versions of Wikipedia with high-quality information. This is possible thanks to the analysis of large publicly available Wikipedia data sets and the use of open semantic knowledge bases (e.g. DBpedia, Wikidata).
Improving the quality of Wikipedia can have a positive impact on the various websites that use its content. For example, Internet search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo) may offer more reliable and accurate information in search results. Various news outlets may use well-documented and credible information in their articles. In addition, tools that use large language models (e.g. ChatGPT) can also improve their quality because they draw knowledge from large text data sets, including Wikipedia. Additionally, improving the quality of Wikipedia can help not only reduce misinformation generated by language models, but also identify fake news on social media.
Event page: pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rekord_Guinnessa_2023