Elusive vandalism detection in wikipedia: a text stability-based approach

The open collaborative nature of wikis encourages participation of all users, but at the same time exposes their content to vandalism. The current vandalism-detection techniques, while effective against relatively obvious vandalism edits, prove to be inadequate in detecting increasingly prevalent sophisticated (or elusive) vandal edits. We identify a number of vandal edits that can take hours, even days, to correct and propose a text stability-based approach for detecting them. Our approach is focused on the likelihood of a certain part of an article being modified by a regular edit. In addition to text-stability, our machine learning-based technique also takes into account edit patterns. We evaluate the performance of our approach on a corpus comprising of 15000 manually labeled edits from the Wikipedia Vandalism PAN corpus. The experimental results show that text-stability is able to improve the performance of the selected machine-learning algorithms significantly.