Wikipedia:Edit check/Tone Check

Screenshot showing the first iteration of the Tone Check card

Tone Check is an Edit Check that uses a small Language Model (SLM) to detect the presence of promotional, derogatory, or otherwise subjective language.

Tone Check (formerly Peacock Check) is being developed by the Editing Team in collaboration with the Machine Learning Team.

Notably, Tone Check is the first Edit Check that uses machine learning. In this case, BERT language model is used to identify biased language within the new text people are attempting to publish to Wikipedia.

To participate in and follow this project's development, we recommend adding this page or the Mediawiki Tone Check page to your watchlist. 

Status

Please visit Edit check/Tone Check#Status to gain a more granular understanding of where the development stands.

Objectives

Tone Check is intended to simultaneously:

1. Cause newer volunteers acting in good faith to add new information to Wikipedia's main namespace that is written in a neutral tone
2. Reduce the effort and attention experienced volunteers need to allocate towards ensuring text in the main namespace is written in a neutral tone.

Background

Writing in a neutral tone is an important part of Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy.

Writing in a neutral tone is also a practice many new volunteers find to be unintuitive. An October 2024 analysis of the new content edits newer volunteers published to English Wikipedia found:

• 56% of the new content edits newer volunteers published contained peacock words.
• 22% of the new content edits newer volunteers published that contained peacock words were reverted
• New content edits containing peacock words were 46.7% more likely to be reverted than new content edits without peacock words

With the above in mind, Tone Check is meant to address two core issues:

1. Newcomers publishing edits to Wikipedia that contain promotional, derogatory, or otherwise subjective language because they lack the awareness that this kind of editing is not aligned with Wikipedia policies.
2. Experienced volunteers being burdened by the effort and attention they need to allocate towards patrolling preventable damage made in good faith.
   1. This can come at the expense of identifying and addressing more subtle and complex forms of vandalism.

More information

For information on design, evaluation, findings, configurability, timeline, background, history, and FAQ, please visit the Mediawiki Tone Check page.

See also

• mw:Growth/Revise Tone, a structured task which uses the same model as Tone Check to suggest edits to newcomers via a feed of articles