Welcome to Wikifunctions
wikifunctions.org
wikifunctions.org
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
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.
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.
> We are not competing with sites such as gist, or sites such as [...] esolangs.org
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]
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)
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.
I don't.
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
Still 42 for Douglas Adams manually assigned token is a nice touch.
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.
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.
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.
Mine is
n/(n+x)
As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1.
When n equals x, it is 0.5
As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller
For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal.
1/(1+3) = 0.25
2/(2+3) = 0.4
3/(3+3) = 0.5
By changing x from 3 to 4, your formula becomes more "suspicious", by changing it from 3 to 2, it becomes more "gullible".
I wonder if this formula has a name already. If not, "the trust formula" might be a candidate.
Perhaps you only define the trust function from n=1+
For a cafe aficionado, who spends most of their time in cafes, reading HN and thinking about formulas, the probability that some random cafe becomes their new favorite is virtually zero.
In other words: The more cafes you already know, the closer to zero the chance that a random one will be the best of them all.
So yeah, it is a formula for cafe lovers. Not for the casual person who is happy with a random filtered coffee swill from the vending machine. Those would have to add a base probability, turning the formula into something like b+n/(n+x)*(1-b).
(s + 1)/(n + x)
E.g. for prior probability 1/2 (success and failure initially equally likely), x=2, so
(s + 1)/(n + 2)
If it's intrinsic, then yes, the probability that it is awesome should not be zero if you've never heard of it. It's awesomeness exists independently of any measurement. But, by definition, you can't know it's awesomeness until you measure it, so awesomeness quotients only matter after they've been measured. And a measured value value must be expressible/observable outside the system (i.e. extrinsic).
Essentially if you have a Beta(a, b) prior then your prior mean is a/(a+b) and after observing n samples from a Bernoulli distribution that are all positive, your posterior is Beta(a+n, b) with posterior mean (a+n)/(a+n+b). So in your example you effectively have a Beta(0, x) prior and x (“suspicious”/“gullible”) is directly interpreted as the strength of your prior!
beta distribution
conjugate
prior
binomial distribution
bernoulli distribution
posterior
Because I could easily grasp that it is a "trust formula" in the way mg described it. But this way to "view" the formula is a mistery to me.
You're asking "Can this way of viewing the formula in terms of Bayesian probability be expressed without any of the machinery of Bayesian probability?".
The probability machinery (Bayes rule) is a principled way to do this, and in the case of count data (number of positive reviews for the cafe) works out to give be a simple fraction n/(n+x).
Define: x = parameter of how skeptical you are in general about the quality of cafes (large x very sceptical), m = number of positive reviews for the cafe,
p = m+1 / (m+1+x) your belief (expressed as a probability) that the cafe is good after hearing m positive reviews about it.
Learning about the binomial and the beta distribution would help you see where the formula comes from. People really like Bayesian machinery, because it has a logical/consistent feel: i.e. rather than coming up with some formula out of thin air, you derive the formula based on general rules about reasoning under uncertainty + updating beliefs.
it looks like it is a two argument function
A neat explainer for how this helps with Bayesian updates (which is the update in trust that you're describing) is here - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-ar...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This abstract Wikipedia sounds like Esperanto to me.
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.
For instance, Wikipedia right now relies quite a lot entirely on manual tagging (authored categories) for classifying related subjects. If you want a list of all notable association footballers, for instance, then the best way to get one is to go to Category:Association football players. But then you're stuck in a very human, flawed, and often in-flux attempt to reach a consensus definition of that, and the list remains out of reach. (Hell, American players are categorized as "soccer players" under the same tree, confounding things like search, because that's the kind of thing Americans do.)
With abstraction, you get classification for much less, and the consensus problem moves from an arbitrary, authored category tree to a much narrower space. If an article is about a footballer, and the abstract data for that subject contains occupation Q937857 (association football player). The dialect and language don't matter — a footballer is a footballer. If you just want a list of footballers, you can get just a list of footballers without even going near things like SPARQL: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinks...
The "having the world's encyclopedia translated by an advertising company" ship sailed years ago. All of these projects are supported, directly and indirectly, by exactly that motivation. The ultimate goal of commercial enterprises is to take zero-cost volunteer projects like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap and make them cheaper for enterprises to associate user input with compatible monetization. It's now just a bonus side-effect, rather than their mission, that any public good comes from these projects.
I fully expect by next year for AI translation of Wiki-like content to be essentially perfect.
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.
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.
[ ] "with a telescope" modifies "I saw"
[ ] "with a telescope" modifies "someone on the hill"
[ ] "saw" - spotted visually
[ ] "saw" - dated romantically
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.
> 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.
"""
RIST 9E03 is the RIST that RIST 11A4 denotes by the arbitrarily chosen bit-pattern that, construed as an integer, is 9E03 (in hexadecimal notation). Click here for more about the system of bit-pattern designators used by RIST 11A4 to replace the obsolescent nomenclature systems of "natural languages." Click here if you would like the designator RIST 9E03 to be automatically replaced by a conventional designator (name) as you browse this web site.
Click.
From now on. the expression RIST 9E03 will be replaced by the expression Andrew Loeb. Warning: we consider such nomenclature fundamentally invalid, and do not recommend its use, but have provided it as a service to first-time visitors to this Web site who are not accustomed to thinking in terms of RISTs.
... Click.
RIST stands for Relatively Independent Sub-Totality.
... Click.
A hive mind is a social organization of RISTs that are capable of processing semantic memes ("thinking"). These could be either carbon-based or silicon-based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience, the constituents of the hive mind are assigned bit-pattern designators.
Click.
A bit-pattern designator is a random series of bits used to uniquely identify a RIST.
"""
A simple example: in Spanish you don't say "I like X" but "X pleases me". In Dutch you say, "I find X tasty" or "X is good" or something else entirely, depending on what X is. Those are three fairly close languages. How can you encode that simple sentence in such a way that it translates properly for all languages, now and in the future?
Symbolic representation isn't going to cut it outside a very narrow subset of language. It might work for highly technical, unambiguous, simple content, but not in general. Whatever you think of ChatGPT, it shows that a neural network can't be beaten for linguistic representation.
I mean, the goal is wikipedia lite basically - so they are targeting technical unambigious simple content.
My understanding is the goal to target small languages where it is unlikely anyone is ever going to put in the effort (or have a big enough corpus) to do the statistical translation methods. Sort of a - this will be better than nothing approach.
I suspect a large proportion of the realistic target audience are bilingual.
It also makes the task of the editor much, much more difficult than it is now.
I guess I’m not sure why this is remotely worth commenting on, but it seems to have struck a nerve. It’s like being upset that NPR takes donations but then gives its staff 15 minutes off to watch a tiny desk concert sometimes.
"Not embracing austerity" is one thing, "asking for donations" is another thing, "what Wikimedia currently does" is something completely different from these two things.
When you get a banner featuring Jimmy Wales with the words "Please read: A personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales" and then something like this:
>To all our readers in the UK,
>Please don’t scroll past this. This Friday, for the 1st time recently, we interrupt your reading to humbly ask you to support Wikipedia’s independence. Only 2% of our readers give. Many think they’ll give later, but then forget. If you donate just £2, or whatever you can this Friday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years.
The impression is that Wikipedia (NOT Wikimedia) is in need of money to keep operating, which is simply not true.
Wikipedia has got more than enough money to keep operating, if Wikipedia, ever in our lifetimes, goes under, it won't be because they weren't given enough money but because they mishandled it.
It's like having a beggar come to you saying that he needs to eat, then seeing him 20 minutes later driving a porsche. I consider this to be abhorrent behavior. I donated once and will NEVER. EVER do it again and I advise nobody does it. If you want to do a good deed donate to the Internet Archive.
I agree, I think it will be because they'll accept more money from commercial actors on the terms of whoever these actors are – Google currently does not seem to force any conditions on WP, as far as I can tell.
> If you want to do a good deed donate to the Internet Archive.
I agree with this as well but I consider both Wikimedia and the Internet Archive as extremely important.
Charitable causes always are at risk of "wasting" money. But the reason for that is that in a purely capitalistic sense the cause itself is not profitable.
Wikifunctions also got nine Google employees from a Google.org Fellowship in April 2022: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/04/14/google-org-fellowship-...
The people whose business models benefit from this project's success will ensure it's staffed and funded. Your donations are emphatically not needed, nor will declining to donate do anything to slow it down.
1 million doesn't even seem that much, but still, yes, nobody knows what donations actually mean behind the scenes (who believes in philantropy anyway?)
I mean, it's clear how much Google and others profit from WP and especially Wikidata already.
But does this mean they control the platform?
Its a weird thing in the non profit world where its often easier to get money for pie in the sky things than keeping the lights on.
[1]: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/04/14/google-org-fellowship-with-abstract-wikipedia-and-wikifunctions/Now, after a good dinner, reading the FAQ again, I'm starting to roughly feel like this might actually make sense, in another world, or maybe it might even make sense in reality when better fleshed-out?
And also I start to remember what this reminds me of (plenty of other entertaining references already here in the comments):
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect
Two days later he started poking around. He started with a seemingly-innocuous file called “customers.json” and stared in confusion at its contents:
{
"File" : "Customers.json",
"Class" : "Customers",
"Author" : "redacted@redacted.com",
"Purpose" : "",
"Functions" : [
568,
899,
900,
901,
902,
1877,
2880
]
}I think the idea is to provide an easy way to embed dynamic content into the text of a Wikipedia article. This should provide a nice compliment to the way WikiData is used to dynamically insert data into articles.
Note: I worked for the Wikimedia foundation in the past, however, I wasn't involved with WikiFunctions. I just have some vague memories of internal product planning discussions about the feature.
[1]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/2MMGKQV5EDDXR27RLQVCZ6TCYIXK2R24/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Luahttps://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu...
Some suggestions for immediate questions that people might want to see on a landing page:
* How does the function collection relate to existing function libraries in various programming languages
* What are the target domain and range of the function set, i.e., what is the overall scope of the project. Even if its open ended it needs some meaningful and self-explanaory scheme to categorize and group them
* What are some gee-wow uses. Why should one be involved. How can this be used outside wikipedia etc
Also I'd say one of the more important pages here is actually https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu...
> In the future:
> * It will be possible to call Wikifunctions functions from other Wikimedia projects, and integrate their results in the output of the page.
> * It will be possible to use data from Wikidata in functions.
> * It will be possible to call data sets from Commons Data namespace.
Everything right now is just transparency about the project's immaturity and publicly alpha-testing actual use cases.[2][3][4]
1: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:FAQ/en
2: All open tickets on Wikilambda, the stack behind Wikifunctions: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/?project=PHID-PR...
3: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/abstract-wikiped... — "We encountered a number of issues while deploying, and it was fascinating to fix these live while the community was watching. There are still a number of high-priority bugs, and we need to fix those before we get to the next step. The current plan is to open the wiki for editing on Tuesday, August 1st 2023, and we’ll update you if that changes."
4: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2...
1: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Apply_for_e...
https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z1 is about "Type: Object"
https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z2 is about "Type: Persistent object"
https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z10 404
https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z100 404
https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z500 is about "Error type: Unspecified error"
https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z1000 404
https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z10000 is about "Function: join strings"The intended built-ins are listed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Reserved_...
There are more interesting examples of some user-made functions at the Older Beta-deployment location the team has been using for the past year: https://wikifunctions.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Ma...
The two implementations are in Python and JavaScript (and rather trivial): https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10004 https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10005
Ref: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:How_to_crea...
I can't figure out how you're going to see implementations of a function in the language of your choice.
Will there be C/C++/D/Go/Rust/Python/Java sections?
But I don't think Wikimedia Foundation wants to provide a free-to-all unlimited compute... No idea what the resource limit plans are, etc. But at least now in this early phase, the user rights are very limited, anyway.
> the creation of new development environments or programming languages or paradigms will become easier, as they could simply refer to Wikilambda for a vast library of functions.
... except morbid curiosity compelled me to the end.
> Initially, we will support two pre-defined Types for the inputs and outputs of Functions: Strings and Booleans. The creation of new Types will at first be restricted to staff members.
Seems like no list support yet.
I can’t even tell if there is a documentation area.
Perhaps this may get better over time?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_...
I'm not sure if that is satire, or for that matter this whole site.
I'm at a loss of words for what I feel towards respecting (even promoting!) the idea that a piece of knowledge ought to become interesting or valuable if there is ethnic relationship to it. It reeks of supremacist talk to me.
If someone came up to me saying that he got into mathematics because Charles Babbage was a white guy, just like him, I'd think that person doesn't belong in current society. This doesn't change if the person belongs to any minority.
Take a step back and think about how your statement really sounds. It's like saying that "a group of extremist geeks who wrote Unix is trying to inject violence into everything". It's faux outrage that misses the point.
> Take a step back and think about how your statement really sounds.
Why dont you tell him how you think it sounds instead of misrepresenting a consensus?
Context is everything. You're not gonna be killed by Unix command, enslaved by Github, and the land you own is not going to be confiscated by people who are writing an encyclopedia.
But IIRC, the first time I encountered the word "master" in computing, it was in the context of serial link data transfer, and there was a "slave".
The fact that a word can be used in the context of slavery doesn't mean the word always and everywhere carries the taint of slavery. What could possibly limit the reach of such a principle? Can I talk about how I like cotton shirts better than other fabrics, when the mere mention of cotton might bring some people back to an uncomfortable place?
I don’t think thats actually true. I think everyone knew the etymology was not slave owners. Which is the problem - its fighting a manufactured battle. Creating “systemic racism” out of thin air.
PP seemed to be concerned about the word "decolonization" specifically, rather than the actual goal of properly organizing the history, and seemed annoyed by it enough to comment here. I would say that justifies it to be called an "outrage", but it's hard to defend or concede now that it has been flagged. I think were they not outraged, they can simply ignore my comment as irrelevant, and they are also welcome to clarify whatever objections they have with respect to that project.
I know. My point was just that it's a needless escalation (just like replying that to you would have been), since even annoyance isn't outrage.
Either way it's talking about the inner emotions of a person on their behalf - flagged or not, how could someone possibly defend themselves against that? People can talk about their own feelings if they want, but talking about the feelings of others, feelings those other people didn't even express, just doesn't lead anywhere good, yet it's so common on the web nowadays. The wisdom of not reading feelings into text has been lost for a long time now. Let's bring it back I say :)
In short, you can ask people how they feel, but you can't tell them. Certainly not via text in absence of a history of actually knowing that individual person (as opposed to "a category of person you perceive that individual to belong to", which is how this came across to me).
> they are also welcome to clarify whatever objections they have with respect to that project.
Yes, and I can't say I disagree with it being flagged because "is this a joke?" is just needlessly convoluted. Just make your point, state where you disagree with the content etc. instead of asking others to rephrase or confirm that yes, they're serious. To me that's just as annoying as saying "y u mad bro?". But since it's already agreed that that's no good, I didn't reiterate that.
The reaction is more similar to people who ARENT bothered by the use of kill, master, etc. The article about “decolonizing” functions is a shoehorned idealogical venture. A completely unnecessary political aside.
I also wouldnt call it outrage. That just seems like a way to make the point sound unreasonable without addressing its logic. If his reaction is outrage then so yours.
Seems pretty reasonable IMO. Feels like pretty mellow and easy actions to take. But the linked post I agree is a bit … condescending? Self congratulating?
If only I ever got to finishing it. Though my version looks more like stackoverflow where people can upvote edits of functions.