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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I fully expect by next year for AI translation of Wiki-like content to be essentially perfect.
> 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.
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.
It also makes the task of the editor much, much more difficult than it is now.
I suspect a large proportion of the realistic target audience are bilingual.
"""
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.
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RIST stands for Relatively Independent Sub-Totality.
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A bit-pattern designator is a random series of bits used to uniquely identify a RIST.
"""
[1]: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/04/14/google-org-fellowship-with-abstract-wikipedia-and-wikifunctions/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.