Abstract Wikipedia
 |  This page is currently a draft. More information pertaining to this may be available on the talk page.
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| 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
Wikimedia's vision is a world in which everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge.
The proposal is to adopt a new
Background / supporting material / existing discussion
Papers and software
- Capturing meaning: Toward an abstract Wikipedia (short intro)
- Architecture for a multilingual Wikipedia (technical aspects)
- 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
- Signpost article on English Wikipedia - with 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). 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
The goal is to see how much interest is 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 need to be figured out and will be adjusted with the community).
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.