Artificial Intelligence startup's study finds over 40,000 scientists overlooked by Wikipedia

A recent study about famous scientists and their work conducted by artificial intelligence (AI) startup Primer has revealed that over 40,000 prominent scientists aren't featured on Wikipedia, with most of them being women.

The research is being done to demonstrate Primer's expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP primarily focuses on understanding and generating digital texts.

In his blog, Primer’s Director of Science John Bohannon explains the development of  ‘Quicksilver,’ a tool that reads around 500 million documents from the source and sifts the most cited figures. Followed by writing a basic draft article about such prominent figures and their work.

He further stated that Quicksilver could also maintain Wikipedia entries and identify the ones that haven’t been updated for a while. Citing an example, the company stated the Wikipedia entry for data scientist Aleksandr Kogan is a good example as he developed the app at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The company noted that editing on Kogan’s Wikipedia page stopped in mid-April which means that updates about him which includes the fact that he also accessed Twitter data, is yet to be added.

Adamant on Primer’s tools to be effective as an assistant to a human-led process, Bohannon stated, “The human editors of the most important source of public information can be supported by machine learning. Algorithms are already used to detect vandalism and identify underpopulated articles. But the machines can do much more.”