ANU Researcher Marian-Andrei Rizoiu has recently presented cutting edge research (Evolution of Privacy Loss in Wikipedia) at the 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining WSDM 2016 Conference in San Francisco. As a result of initial research-oriented talks, Marian-Andrei was subsequently invited to share the privacy-related insights with the broader wikimedia community at the March’16 edition of the Wikimedia Research Showcase.
The research of Dr Rizoiu has exposed two major implications on the privacy of those who contribute to Wikipedia by passing Wikipedia’s data through a Machine Learning algorithm.
Rizoiu a Researcher in the Research School of Computer Science’s Machine Learning area, has concerns for privacy and data-driven user security, concerning both their editor and reader populations.
The talk which was broadcasted live on YouTube and linked on Wikipedia, forms an important resource for members of the Wikipedia and Wikimedia community.
“This is one of those rare examples where the general community becomes aware of results of the research world” Says Dr Rizoiu “especially true for this work, which touches directly at the neuralgic point of the community: privacy. As far as we know, this is the first paper showing that the privacy of Wikipedia editors could be harmed by their contributions.”.