Translation solves an immediate problem of giving human users a glimpse of Wikipedias knowledge base, but it is still stricly wrapped in textual data. It is still a content black box that, e.g an LLM would not make more transparent.
Abstraction builds a mathematical representation. Its a new product and it opens up new use cases that have nothing to do with translation. It may on occasion be more factually correct than a translation, or may be used in conjuction with translation, but is potentially a far more flexible and versatile technology.
The challege is really matching ambition and vision with resources and execution. Especially if it is to attract volunteers to crowdsource the enormous task, it needs to have a very clear and attractive onboarding ramp. The somewhat related Wikidata / wikibase projects seem to have a reasonable fan base so there is precedent.
Translation solves an immediate problem of giving human users a glimpse of Wikipedias knowledge base, but it is still stricly wrapped in textual data. It is still a content black box that, e.g an LLM would not make more transparent.
Abstraction builds a mathematical representation. Its a new product and it opens up new use cases that have nothing to do with translation. It may on occasion be more factually correct than a translation, or may be used in conjuction with translation, but is potentially a far more flexible and versatile technology.
The challege is really matching ambition and vision with resources and execution. Especially if it is to attract volunteers to crowdsource the enormous task, it needs to have a very clear and attractive onboarding ramp. The somewhat related Wikidata / wikibase projects seem to have a reasonable fan base so there is precedent.