Aaron Halfaker


Aaron Halfaker is an American computer scientist and a principal research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Education and career

Halfaker earned a B.S. in computer science from the College of St. Scholastica in 2006, where he started off as a physical therapy major but switched to computer science after taking a programming class with associate professor Diana Johnson. He later earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the GroupLens research lab at the University of Minnesota in 2013. He is known for his research on Wikipedia and the decrease in the number of active editors of the site. He has said that Wikipedia began a "decline phase" around 2007 and has continued to decline since then. Halfaker has also studied automated accounts on Wikipedia, known as bots, and the way they affect new contributors to the site. While a graduate student, he, along with Stuart Geiger, developed a tool for Wikipedia editing called "", the goal of which is to eliminate vandalism and spam, and to also highlight constructive contributions by new editors. He has also built an artificial intelligence engine known as "Objective Revision Evaluation Service", used to identify vandalism on Wikipedia and distinguish it from good faith edits.