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This has to be one of the most confusing documentation sites I have ever seen. Maybe I just don't get it, since I never edited Wikipedia.

Opening some of the pages at random, like

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z828

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z110

There's a "try this function" section, which I couldn't get to take any sort of input on a few tries. It always ended up with a field that said "no results found" on typing things in it.

There's a "current object" section, displaying some kind of alien script. Like, what is this? Is it supposed to tell me something?

    "Z1K1": "Z2",
    "Z2K1": {
        "Z1K1": "Z6",
        "Z6K1": "Z110"
    },
    "Z2K2": {
        "Z1K1": "Z8",
    this goes on for quite a while
Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?



We didn’t want to announce Wikifunctions before you can edit it (what’s a wiki if you can’t edit it?).

It is currently in locked-down testing. We have been slowly configuring and testing the wiki, the first new multilingual project in over 12 years! It is more complicated than a normal new wiki, in many ways.

We are expecting to open it to broader editing in the next few days - on or after August 1. We are planning an announcement at that time.

There are details of the deployment plan in our last newsletter: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_...

And a broad overview of the project at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Overview

(And many more examples of functions at our older Beta-deployment location (also currently locked down) at https://wikifunctions.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Ma... )

I hope that context helps! [Disclaimer: I'm not a developer, but work with the team]


Disclosure, not disclaimer.


> Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?

Abstract Wikipedia authors/editors/developers is the target audience. As far as I can gather, this Wikifunctions is supposed to be a store for functions used to generate text based on data, so things can be written once and "automatically" translated to many languages, meaning you can cover more by stating "facts" and matching them to outputted language somehow.


> Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?

That would be my biggest criticism too. It seems like the target audience and use cases are ill defined, vauge and hand wavey.

I dont think it knows really what it wants to be, other than definitely some sort of function store for abstract wikipedia, which also seems unnessarily complex.

Quite frankly i get massive wikidata-second-system vibes from the whole thing.


Huh, it took me a while to find that there is a UI for exactly this object on "Details" tab.

I hope "Z1K1": "Z2" will be removed from UI soon. It is like "Q42 P31 Q5" for Wikidata - everyone understands it, but it is not the main interface.

Basically, at this point of development, consider this as a storage of Python (https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10004) or Javascript code (https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10005).

But instead of writing

  def format_person_info(name, surname, birth_date, death_date):
     return "{} {} ({}-{})".format(name, surname, birth_date, death_date)
you need to

1) create a page that declares a public interface for your function: and there is no "camel case vs snake case": function name will be "Format person info" (and フォーマット担当者情報 in Japanese, and so on), with arguments: name, surname, birth date, death date (again, people can add translations)

2) create a set of tests

3) create an implementation using Zvalues (see links above for example) in public interface. If this is not the first version, implementation can be reviewed and approved by some reviewer.


> It is like "Q42 P31 Q5" for Wikidata - everyone understands it, ...

I don't.


It's a semantic triple [1] - subject, predicate, object - made out of Wikidata IDs. Some common ones one will quickly memorize and start to recognize if one works with Wikidata.

Q42 is Douglas Adams [2], P31 is instance of [3], Q5 is human [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple

[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q42

[3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P31

[4] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5


Fascinating. I had no idea people are still working on this sweetly optimistic project, like the architects writing a catalog of data taxonomies but for the unfenced territory of humanities knowledge. Sort of a modern Principia Mathematica with the Gödel of GPT4 waiting to blow it away.

Still 42 for Douglas Adams manually assigned token is a nice touch.


I have a half hour YouTube video on that topic, maybe you'll find it interesting, but likely too long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqYBx2gB6vA


It was interesting. I don’t think cheap matters much in a world:where compute is still getting rapidly cheaper. Being certain is good, but the throwmtons of data i to massive models keeps beating everything else. I do think the models need to get some self doubt built in some how but I don’t think the data catalog will be more than post NOC fact checking. Fun times tho.


Edited: It was interesting. I don’t think cheap matters much in a world where compute is still getting rapidly cheaper. Being certain is good, but the throw tons of data into massive models keeps beating everything else. I do think the models need to get some self doubt built in some how but I don’t think the data catalog will be more than post hoc fact checking. Fun times tho. (My mom was an editor, she'd be horrified.)


much of the AI projects would not really be possible without linked data, so it seems a bit silly to call it optimistic. the two are connected


Kind of surprised nobody's posted this in reply yet (or that these aren't linked to from anywhere I can find in the UI), but:

on ZObjects: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/ZObject

on human-readable equivalents to the above: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Canonical...

It's all so very utopian.


Thanks, that's really helpful to read! The page is still in a very early stage. You are right, the current object section is just confusing, we will remove it.

Maybe a better start to understand what Wikifunctions does - but it is a very simple example too - is this function: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z10000

The other functions that you found randomly are currently not well supported.

We are working on it, to make it less confusing. Such feedback is very helpful.


As planned, with our first scheduled weekly deployment, the JSON object is not being displayed anymore.


I spent a few minutes scanning the 'intro' pages. If there were any function examples there, I missed it/them.

A simple example or five of what in the hell a function can do might motivate some readers to want to dig deeper. I don't want to today.


https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu...

> We are not competing with sites such as gist, or sites such as [...] esolangs.org


Somehow that still doesnt give enough counter examples to figure out what it is.


I think the Current Object section is specifying the hierarchy for the current page and also the hierarchy compared to its relatives. All the Z something identifiers are objects/pages/concepts




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