Spam Users Identification in Wikipedia Via Editing Behavior

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of identifying spam users on Wikipedia and present our preliminary results. We formulate the problem as a binary classification task and propose a set of features based on user editing behavior to separate spammers from benign users. We tested our system on a new dataset we built consisting of 4.2K (half spam and half benign) users and 75.6K edits. Experimental results show that our approach reaches 80.8% classification accuracy and 0.88 mean average precision. We compared against ORES, the most recent tool developed by Wikimedia which assigns a damaging score to each edit, and we show that our system outperforms ORES in spam users detection. Moreover, by combining our features with ORES, classification accuracy increases to 82.1%. Additionally, we also show that our system performs well in a more realistic, unbalanced setting, that is, when spammers are greatly outnumbered by benign users, by achieving an AUROC of 0.84 (which increases to 0.86 when we combine with ORES).