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Wikifunctions is primarily intended to support Wikimedia projects, especially Abstract Wikipedia. It is the code complement to Wikidata lexemes. It might be use

Wikifunctions is primarily intended to support Wikimedia projects, especially Abstract Wikipedia. It is the code complement to Wikidata lexemes. It might be used for cross-wiki templates to reduce existing duplication and other auxiliary tasks, but Abstract Wikipedia is the reason it was proposed.

vasco 3y ago
Abstract Wikipedia is in my opinion fully wasted work. Translation is free and instant for web pages. I've lived for 6 years in different countries where I don't speak the local language (and am also not native English speaking) and you can get all the information you need by translating. This works totally fine already today with Google translate on top of pages. And the pages that are in fact missing from "the other language wikis" are local myths, local detailed history, things that wouldn't even be in the English Wikipedia or in the "abstract" version in the first place.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Not to mention that machine translation became dramatically better with LLMs like GPT 4 and will just get better over time... rapidly. I fully expect by next year for AI translation of Wiki-like content to be essentially perfect.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Not everyone wants to use Google services to be able to read information on Wikipedia.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    And not everyone wants to donate to wikpeda to solve a solved problem
    - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
      improving language (and communication) is never a solved problem
- nologic01 3y ago
  This is wrong on two counts: 1) translation is not the same as abstraction and 2) having the world's encyclopedia translated by an advertising company is not exactly everybody's idea for how things should be organized Of course wrong criticism doesnt mean the project is a success (i think its been going for a few years now). The documentation in particular does not highlight what this infrastructure is good for.
  - sneak 3y ago
    "translated by an advertising company" is akin to "Tor was funded by the US government" - it's basically organizational ad hominem. Google's translations are fine and are high quality and don't yet (or in the foreseeable future) inject ad copy into the translations (like they do on eg Google Maps for POIs).
    - trashburger 3y ago
      That's apples and oranges though. Tor is out of control of the US military as this point (+/- your tinfoil hat level), whereas Google Translate was created and is owned solely by Google. I'm not saying GP is fully correct but context is important. I personally think using transformers for, well, transforming input into another language is going to be a great approach once hardware catches up for local offline use at a reasonable speed and hallucinations are minimized.
    - nologic01 3y ago
      Corporate entities come and go. They bait-and-switch at will as they are ultimately only answering to legal obligations and in particular shareholders. It would be odd to overlay such a liability and uncertainty on top of wikipedia. While abstraction is not the same as translation, if the wikipedia community wants specifically a translation service that is more tightly integrated into the platform imho it should be a fully open source project.
  - vasco 3y ago
    My point is about translating after the fact by the end user solving the problem. Now you can use Google translate for free, later you can use your own LLM. Abstracting the knowledge away is wasted work. We already have it in a definitive source language (english for most things, local languages for local things). This abstract Wikipedia sounds like Esperanto to me.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  This works totally fine already today with Google translate on top of pages. How would anyone even know? By definition, if someone is using Google Translate, he already doesn't know the language, so how can he judge the quality of the results? My company spends millions on professional translators because products like Google Translate are so bad for anything beyond the most basic uses.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > Translation is free and instant for web pages. And also very often quite incorrect, and you don't know where. I think the general idea of a "universal language" Wikipedia, that gets flawlessly rendered into local languages, is laudable. But I don't think anybody would ever edit in it directly -- what I want to see is that when somebody edits Wikipedia to add a new sentence, it attempts to translate into the "universal language" and prompt you to select from ambiguities. E.g. if you wrote: I saw someone on the hill with a telescope. It would ask you to confirm which of the following was intended: [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "I saw" [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "someone on the hill" And it would also ask to clarify meanings, e.g.: [ ] "saw" - spotted visually [ ] "saw" - dated romantically It would be a real dream to have translated outputs that were guaranteed to be correct, because the intermediate representation was correct, because the translation from someone's native language to that intermediate translation was verified in this way.
  - vasco 3y ago
    I would still invest those resources into documenting more knowledge that currently doesn't exist online on their original languages and immediately translating to English. For better or for worse English is the "abstract" representation of language online and there's so much absent stuff that worrying about another universal format seems pointless.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      It's not either/or. Different groups of people can do different things at once. And of the two things you're comparing, one is expert technical/engineering and the other requires expert archivists/translators. They're totally different groups.
  - vrandecic 3y ago
    exactly that! I have a design mockup that is quite similar to that.
- guy98238710 3y ago
  You might well be right. Furthermore, English is on its way to become the universal language everyone speaks. You are however wrong about comparing AW to translators, which are probabilistic algorithms whereas AW is intended to be as exact as Wolfram Alpha. AW should be also able to use Wikidata to generate unique articles that do not exist even in English. BTW, translation tech is not as good as you paint it here. I regularly translate my English blog posts to Slovak and every blog post requires 20-30 corrections. DeepL is marginally better than Google Translate. GPT-4 cannot even get word inflection right, an embarrassing fail for such a large model.
cypress66 3y ago
Talk about over engineering
- bawolff 3y ago
  Yeah, you're not the only one to think that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-01-01/Technology_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
  - andybak 3y ago
    Wow. This feels like someone has taken a Borges parody and ran with it: > What is the scope of the new "Wikipedia of functions"? > [...] Vrandečić explained the concept of Abstract Wikipedia and a "wiki for functions" using an example describing political happenings involving San Francisco mayor London Breed: > "Instead of saying "in order to deny her the advantage of the incumbent, the board votes in January 2018 to replace her with Mark Farrell as interim mayor until the special elections", imagine we say something more abstract such as elect(elector: Board of Supervisors, electee: Mark Farrell, position: Mayor of San Francisco, reason: deny(advantage of incumbency, London Breed)) – and even more, all of these would be language-independent identifiers, so that thing would actually look more like Q40231(Q3658756, Q6767574, Q1343202(Q6015536, Q6669880)). > [...] We still need to translate [this] abstract content to natural language. So we would need to know that the elect constructor mentioned above takes the three parameters in the example, and that we need to make a template such as {elector} elected {electee} to {position} in order to {reason} (something that looks much easier in this example than it is for most other cases). And since the creation of such translators has to be made for every supported language, we need to have a place to create such translators so that a community can do it. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to decide if this is all really stupid or not. If I had to summarize my feelings it would probably be along the lines of Q6767574, (Q6015536, Q654880), Q65660.
    - Levitz 3y ago
      My takeaway from this is that Wikimedia clearly has way, way too much money.

vasco 3y ago

Abstract Wikipedia is in my opinion fully wasted work. Translation is free and instant for web pages. I've lived for 6 years in different countries where I don't speak the local language (and am also not native English speaking) and you can get all the information you need by translating. This works totally fine already today with Google translate on top of pages. And the pages that are in fact missing from "the other language wikis" are local myths, local detailed history, things that wouldn't even be in the English Wikipedia or in the "abstract" version in the first place.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Not to mention that machine translation became dramatically better with LLMs like GPT 4 and will just get better over time... rapidly. I fully expect by next year for AI translation of Wiki-like content to be essentially perfect.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
Not everyone wants to use Google services to be able to read information on Wikipedia.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  And not everyone wants to donate to wikpeda to solve a solved problem
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    improving language (and communication) is never a solved problem
nologic01 3y ago
This is wrong on two counts: 1) translation is not the same as abstraction and 2) having the world's encyclopedia translated by an advertising company is not exactly everybody's idea for how things should be organized Of course wrong criticism doesnt mean the project is a success (i think its been going for a few years now). The documentation in particular does not highlight what this infrastructure is good for.
- sneak 3y ago
  "translated by an advertising company" is akin to "Tor was funded by the US government" - it's basically organizational ad hominem. Google's translations are fine and are high quality and don't yet (or in the foreseeable future) inject ad copy into the translations (like they do on eg Google Maps for POIs).
  - trashburger 3y ago
    That's apples and oranges though. Tor is out of control of the US military as this point (+/- your tinfoil hat level), whereas Google Translate was created and is owned solely by Google. I'm not saying GP is fully correct but context is important. I personally think using transformers for, well, transforming input into another language is going to be a great approach once hardware catches up for local offline use at a reasonable speed and hallucinations are minimized.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Corporate entities come and go. They bait-and-switch at will as they are ultimately only answering to legal obligations and in particular shareholders. It would be odd to overlay such a liability and uncertainty on top of wikipedia. While abstraction is not the same as translation, if the wikipedia community wants specifically a translation service that is more tightly integrated into the platform imho it should be a fully open source project.
- vasco 3y ago
  My point is about translating after the fact by the end user solving the problem. Now you can use Google translate for free, later you can use your own LLM. Abstracting the knowledge away is wasted work. We already have it in a definitive source language (english for most things, local languages for local things). This abstract Wikipedia sounds like Esperanto to me.
reaperducer 3y ago
This works totally fine already today with Google translate on top of pages. How would anyone even know? By definition, if someone is using Google Translate, he already doesn't know the language, so how can he judge the quality of the results? My company spends millions on professional translators because products like Google Translate are so bad for anything beyond the most basic uses.
crazygringo 3y ago
> Translation is free and instant for web pages. And also very often quite incorrect, and you don't know where. I think the general idea of a "universal language" Wikipedia, that gets flawlessly rendered into local languages, is laudable. But I don't think anybody would ever edit in it directly -- what I want to see is that when somebody edits Wikipedia to add a new sentence, it attempts to translate into the "universal language" and prompt you to select from ambiguities. E.g. if you wrote: I saw someone on the hill with a telescope. It would ask you to confirm which of the following was intended: [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "I saw" [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "someone on the hill" And it would also ask to clarify meanings, e.g.: [ ] "saw" - spotted visually [ ] "saw" - dated romantically It would be a real dream to have translated outputs that were guaranteed to be correct, because the intermediate representation was correct, because the translation from someone's native language to that intermediate translation was verified in this way.
- vasco 3y ago
  I would still invest those resources into documenting more knowledge that currently doesn't exist online on their original languages and immediately translating to English. For better or for worse English is the "abstract" representation of language online and there's so much absent stuff that worrying about another universal format seems pointless.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    It's not either/or. Different groups of people can do different things at once. And of the two things you're comparing, one is expert technical/engineering and the other requires expert archivists/translators. They're totally different groups.
- vrandecic 3y ago
  exactly that! I have a design mockup that is quite similar to that.
guy98238710 3y ago
You might well be right. Furthermore, English is on its way to become the universal language everyone speaks. You are however wrong about comparing AW to translators, which are probabilistic algorithms whereas AW is intended to be as exact as Wolfram Alpha. AW should be also able to use Wikidata to generate unique articles that do not exist even in English. BTW, translation tech is not as good as you paint it here. I regularly translate my English blog posts to Slovak and every blog post requires 20-30 corrections. DeepL is marginally better than Google Translate. GPT-4 cannot even get word inflection right, an embarrassing fail for such a large model.

cypress66 3y ago

Talk about over engineering

bawolff 3y ago
Yeah, you're not the only one to think that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-01-01/Technology_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- andybak 3y ago
  Wow. This feels like someone has taken a Borges parody and ran with it: > What is the scope of the new "Wikipedia of functions"? > [...] Vrandečić explained the concept of Abstract Wikipedia and a "wiki for functions" using an example describing political happenings involving San Francisco mayor London Breed: > "Instead of saying "in order to deny her the advantage of the incumbent, the board votes in January 2018 to replace her with Mark Farrell as interim mayor until the special elections", imagine we say something more abstract such as elect(elector: Board of Supervisors, electee: Mark Farrell, position: Mayor of San Francisco, reason: deny(advantage of incumbency, London Breed)) – and even more, all of these would be language-independent identifiers, so that thing would actually look more like Q40231(Q3658756, Q6767574, Q1343202(Q6015536, Q6669880)). > [...] We still need to translate [this] abstract content to natural language. So we would need to know that the elect constructor mentioned above takes the three parameters in the example, and that we need to make a template such as {elector} elected {electee} to {position} in order to {reason} (something that looks much easier in this example than it is for most other cases). And since the creation of such translators has to be made for every supported language, we need to have a place to create such translators so that a community can do it. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to decide if this is all really stupid or not. If I had to summarize my feelings it would probably be along the lines of Q6767574, (Q6015536, Q654880), Q65660.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    My takeaway from this is that Wikimedia clearly has way, way too much money.