Abstract Wikipedia

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project.

Wikilambda (working title)
Community decision.
Status of the proposal
Status	under discussion
Details of the proposal
Project description	Many Wikipedia language editions have large gaps in knowledge. We want to close these gaps by allowing to create and maintain content in one place and allow the Wikipedias to use this content if they choose so, instead of doing that in each of the Wikipedia language editions individually. This will allow more people to access and create more knowledge in more languages in the Wikipedias. In order to do this, we need to represent the content in a way that can be translated to many different natural languages with high fidelity. We do this by introducing a new project, Wikilambda, that allows to create, maintain, catalogue and evaluate functions as a new form of knowledge the communities work on. This will allow completely new use cases, and allow more people to share in more forms of knowledge than today.
Is it a multilingual wiki?	one multilingual wiki
Potential number of languages	multilingual, in the same way as Wikidata
Proposed tagline	A wiki for functions
Proposed URL	Depends on the name which is to be a community decision.
Technical requirements
New features to require	yes. A detailed technical proposal will be made available here.
Development wiki	Part of the technical proposal.
Interested participants
Denny (proposal author)

Many Wikipedia language editions have large gaps in knowledge. We want to close these gaps by allowing to create and maintain content in one place and allow the Wikipedias to use this content if they choose so, instead of doing that in each of the Wikipedia language editions individually. This will allow more people to access and create more knowledge in more languages in the Wikipedias.

In order to do this, we need to represent the content in a way that can be translated to many different natural languages with high fidelity. We do this by introducing a new project, Wikilambda, that allows to create, maintain, catalogue and evaluate functions as a new form of knowledge the communities work on. This will allow completely new use cases, and allow more people to share in more forms of knowledge than today.

Proposal

Abstract Wikipedia is a proposed extension to Wikidata that would capture the content next to the Wikidata items. Think of it as a new namespace, where we could create, maintain, and collaborate on the abstract content. The individual Wikipedias - and I cannot stress this enough - have the choice to use some or any or all or none of the content from Abstract Wikipedia, but I most definitely do not expect the content of the current Wikipedias to be replaced by this. In fact, I have no doubt that any decent article in any language Wikipedia will remain superior to the outcome of the proposed new architecture by far. This is a proposal for the places where the current system left us with gaps, not a proposal to turn the parts that are already brilliant today dull and terrible tomorrow.

Wikilambda is a proposed new Wikimedia project that allows us to share in a new form of knowledge assets, functions. You can think of it as similar to Modules or Templates, but much extended, with places for tests, different languages, evaluation, and also for all kind of functions, not only those that are immediately useful for one of the Wikimedia projects, and most importantly, shared among the projects. So one of the first goals would be to increasingly allow fo a place to have global templates, another idea that has been discussed and asked for for a very long time. Wikilambda, just as Wikidata, is expected to start as a project supporting the immediate needs of the sister projects, and over time to grow to a project that stands on its own merits as well.

Background / supporting material / existing discussion

Papers and software

• Capturing meaning: Toward an abstract Wikipedia (short intro)
• Architecture for a multilingual Wikipedia (technical aspects)
  • Twitter thread about the paper
• Collaborating on the sum of all knowledge across languages (social aspects)
• Prototype implementation

Videos

Note that the two long videos are rather redundant to each other.

• Short intro to Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia idea (New York, 2019) (18 min)
• Keynote at SWAT4HCLS (Edinburgh, 2019) (56 min)
• Keynote at EMWCon (Daly City, 2019) (1:02h)

Wikimedia community discussions

• Discussion on wikimedia-l about the paper proposing Wikilambda and Abstract Wikipedia
• Discussion on wikidata mailing list
• Discussion on Meta
• Signpost article on English Wikipedia - with discussion
• Kurier article on German Wikipedia - with a (mostly preceding!) discussion
• 2013 proposal on Meta and discussion

Proposed by

Denny Vrandečić is founder of Wikidata, co-founder of Semantic MediaWiki, first administrator and bureaucrat of the Croatian Wikipedia, community-elected member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation 2015-2016.

Alternative names

Wikilambda is just a project name. One of the first tasks of the projects will be to come up with the communities with a name for the project and that is available as a domain name. Some options include Wikifunction, Wikicode, Wikialgorithm, but I am sure the community will have even better ideas.

Related projects / proposals

The following projects would be most affected by Wikilambda, but all Wikimedia Projects will be able to call functions in Wikilambda.

• Wikidata - suggested to store abstract Content in Wikidata next to the item pages
• Wikipedia - suggested to allow to display Content from Wikidata for missing articles

There are numerous proposals that cover aspects of Wikilambda and that have been made over the years (going back to 2001). The large number of related proposals is another indicator of the wish to get this done. In this proposal we aim to extract the common goals and learn from the other proposals:

• Global templates - a proposal with some overlapping goals
• WikiAI - a repository for ML models
• Wikitemplates - similar to the Global templates proposal above
• WikiDerivations
• Wikilanguage - linguist knowledge needs to be recorded in Wikilambda beyond Wiktionary
• Girgit - may be developed in Wikilambda
• WikiSandy - index Wikipedia content semantically
• Wikimath - a wiki that can do math
• DRMF - capture mathemtical formulas
• Wikimedia Pi Abacus
• WikiProves
• WikiTeched - providing an IDE for developing etc.
• Global-Wiki - the parts regarding global templates and modules
• WikiApps - provide access to functions and algorithms
• EncycloPDia - computational knowledge engine
• WikiCalculator - implementable in Wikilambda
• Konsciajxo - seems almost the same idea, but goes well beyond that
• Wikilinguistica - information about syntax and grammar etc.
• Wikidioma - information about agreement and declinations etc.
• WikiCode - pretty much the same idea
• Wikibot - give access to content in Wikipedia
• Wikipedia Virtual Mind - could be implemented with Wikilambda

Domain names

Depends on the name.

Mailing list link

• An email to wikimedia-l will be sent once this page is not a draft and the link will be added here

Demos

• A prototype implementation is available on Github.
• The easiest way to dive into the prototype is by reading the walkthrough.

Support and discussion

tl;dr: express your support on the talk page

We don't really have an effective process for starting new projects, so I am trying to follow a similar path that we took for Wikidata back then. And back then it all started with Markus Krötzsch, me and others talking about the idea to anyone who would listen until everyone was bored of hearing it, trying out prototypes, and then talking about it even more, and improving all of it constantly based on your feedback. And then making increasingly concrete proposals until we managed to show some kind of consensus from the communities, you, and the Foundation to actually do it. And then, well, do it.

The goal is to show interest in making this goal a reality, and then go to the Board of Trustees and ask them to commit to this project (in rough strokes - the details of the proposal will be further adjusted with you). But in order for the Board to confidently agree, we need to show support for the project.

If you support the goals of this proposal, please express your support on the talk page.

Also discussions and reservations regarding the goal of the proposal or the project plan should be raised there.

Just as with Wikipedia and Wikidata and our other projects, this is a crazy idea at first. Maybe even more crazy than our other projects. And the only way there is a chance of us being successful is, if, eventually, thousands of us work together on it. The only way this worked in the past is by being open, start out collaboratively, discuss the path forward, and work towards creating the project together.