English subtitles for clip: File:Wikimania 2021 Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions Introduction.webm

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Hello, and welcome to Wikimania! Thank you for your interest in Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions.

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Our goal is a world where everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge

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But today the knowledge in Wikipedia is very unevenly distributed. English has millions of articles,

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but Hausa, with sixty million native speakers, and thirty million second language speakers, has about ten thousand articles.

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The fundamental issue is that Wikipedia’s cost is basically the number of topics times the number of languages - 

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all articles about a topic in each language are created and maintained completely independently.

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Can we change that? Can we turn the multiplication -

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into an Addition and thus reduce the cost of Wikipedia by two orders of magnitude and more.

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Yes, we can! Wikidata demonstrates a step in this direction:

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This is the article about Marie Curie in the Urdu Wikipedia.

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These blue parts - the top part, the side part  - are translated by MediaWiki. That’s taken care of.

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The red parts - the infobox, references, language links, and Authority control files

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they already are not maintained locally anymore, but in Wikidata. 

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And a growing number of Wikipedia language editions choose to share from Wikidata’s common knowledge base, 

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to work together on maintaining knowledge in one single place, 

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to keep it up to date, to keep it correct, and to use it to display knowledge on their Wikipedias.

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So all we have to do is to move everything from Wikipedia to Wikidata and done?

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Unfortunately, no. The major problem is that Wikidata has a very limited expressivity.

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It cannot do Narration, and narration is fundamental for humans to learn. 

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Wikidata can’t do reference by description, and it is bad at redundancy.

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To just illustrate the last thing, about redundancy, 

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there is one fact about Marie Curie which is mentioned in the lead of basically every language edition of her article, 

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even the short Urdu article we saw:

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She is the only person to ever have won the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields!

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This is a fact that Wikidata cannot express, 

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although it is clearly important as we can see because all these Wikipedias had contributors 

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who went through the effort of writing it down in the lead of the article.

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Abstract Wikipedia will extend the expressivity Wikidata provides considerably, 

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and then we will have functions to generate natural language text from this new abstract representation 

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and allow the Wikipedias to fill their gaps with this baseline knowledge content generated from Wikidata.

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All we need to do, is switch out this function, used on the same content, and we get text in a different language.

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This leads to an architecture where we have only one content per topic and one set of renderers per language, thus indeed fulfilling the goal -

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of having the cost of Wikipedia being topics plus languages, not topics times languages.

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So, who is going to write all these functions that generate text in hundreds of languages?

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Well, even though there are plenty of people in our panel, that’s not enough people to create renderers for hundreds of languages.

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Instead we will create a platform, a new wiki, where a community will be able to create functions -

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Wikifunctions

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A wiki where you can use functions to answer your questions,

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Where you can create more functions to answer more types of questions

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We will be the first Wikimedia project to launch since 2012.

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Wikifunctions aims to be fully multilingual, like Wikidata, both in terms of natural as well as programming languages.

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And we won’t be focusing just on natural language functions, but we will do all kinds of functions.

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So, what is a function?

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A function takes some input and then we have some algorithm, some recipe, that allows us to calculate the output of the function. 

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That’s the technical definition. But more importantly:

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Functions are a type of knowledge

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Functions are a type of knowledge, and therefore it’s our job to allow everyone to share in this knowledge.

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But currently, we are not that good at letting anyone share in this kind of knowledge.

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The big tech companies graciously allow you to access some functions:

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Ask Siri how many teaspoons are in two tablespoons, and it will answer. That’s a function, running right there on the phone for you.

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Or go to Bing and ask, “When was Wikipedia founded?” and it will not check the Web index, even though Bing is a search engine, 

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but it will run a function against its Knowledge Graph, Satori, which is like our Wikidata.

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Take that date, go to DuckDuckGo, and ask how many days have passed since then.

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Again, the result is not a search result, but a function evaluation.

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Ask Google about the volume of a Pyramid, and it will give you this beautiful handcrafted experience, 

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and the answer will be calculated by a function.

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But if you move out of these select few handcrafted experiences that the tech companies have chosen to deploy - you are out of luck.

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Even though we have enough computing power in our hands, most of us cannot use this computing power to calculate the functions we need.

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Functions are a type of knowledge

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Knowledge is power

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And functions really are a superpower

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Because functions are not just knowledge, no, they can with confidence answer questions no one has ever asked before

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Functions create knowledge. And what’s more a superpower than creating knowledge?

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We want to democratize this superpower. We want to give it to everyone with access to the Web.

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For this we will introduce Wikifunctions as a new wiki project, 

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where a community can create functions, and where people can use functions to answer their questions. 

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(These next few slides show some old mockup designs that just give a rough idea of how it might work.)

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This wiki will have functions such as converting tablespoons to teaspoons, like Siri did earlier

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Calculating how many days passed between two dates, like in DuckDuckGo

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Taking a geoshape uploaded to Commons and calculate how many square miles that shape covers.

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Or taking a string and reversing it

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Here’s a short demo of how the "reverse" function looks like in our current Prototype

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We see that the function takes a string, here's the argument that takes a string, and returns a string,

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and it has one implementation in JavaScript, that looks like this. It is stored in another page, and is being transcluded. 

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This is the reverse function. And if we want to run it, we can go to the "evaluate function call" special page, 

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and call the reverse function on a value like "Wikipedia". And the results here: "aidepikiW"

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The interface shown here is still very early and very rough

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We are working right now on a full design of our interface, and here is a very first sneak peek.

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but back to the older mockups.

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Here’s a simple function, for multiplying positive numbers.

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As I said earlier, we support several programming languages. So far we have implemented JavaScript and Python, we want to support many more.

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Here’s how multiplication is implemented in JavaScript, using the native multiplication.

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Here in Python, basically the same

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This implementation though is different. Here we implement multiplication in something called composition.

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We take functions that already exist in Wikifunctions and compose them together in order to get more powerful functions implemented.

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Now the really interesting part here is: since these functions used in the composition are functions in Wikifunctions itself

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And just like Items in Wikidata have their QID, each Function also has its own page, its own ZID

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The functions down here, add, zero, and so on, are ZIDs with labels in different language

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And that allows us to switch languages

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And we can see the same composition in German

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Or in Bengali

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And not just read the implementation in Bengali, but also write it in Bengali

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We are aiming to allow people to create implementations without having to know basic English,

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Which is a major blocker for many people in the world to create functions, as research has repeatedly shown - 

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including research by frequent Wikimania attendee Benjamin Mako Hill.

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For many many people this will be the first time that they will be able to write implementations in their native language.

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For hundreds of millions of people we will unlock that superpower of using, reading, and writing functions.

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For Wikifunctions, we will have a new community, with people from the existing projects, 

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and mixing in new people who have never contributed to our projects before.

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We want to make functions accessible in many different ways,   

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through many different gateways, wherever you need them, whenever you need them

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on the Web, on your phone, through an assistant, within a spreadsheet - and in the Wikimedia projects.

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And we want to generate multilingual content from expressive abstract representations in 300+ languages

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Which is why we need to make it available to as many people as possible.

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To aim at people who don’t speak English. At people who are not already coders.

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We call this aiming high, aiming wide, instead of narrowing on just English speaking coders. 

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We have a lot of discussion about this, because it is very ambitious, it is difficult. 

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We are doing user research to understand how difficult it is.

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Just one surprising example:

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most people think that coding correlates with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) abilities, with mathematical abilities, 

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and many people who don’t think of themselves as being strong in STEM dismiss participating in coding before even taking a closer look. 

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Even though research published last year in Nature shows no correlation between STEM and programming, 

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but a clear and strong correlation between language aptitude and learning programming languages.

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Language aptitude! Exactly!

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So the very same people who are contributing to Wikipedia and to Wiktionary 

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are exactly the people that would have the capabilities and the motivation to contribute. 

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And we need their contributions to cover 300 languages. 

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We need to solve the challenge of how to frame the project, and reach them, 

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because in our user research so far they are the ones who say “oh, I don’t need to understand this” and go away. 

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That’s why it is so important to get the framing right, to make it inviting.

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Here are two early milestones we want to pass next year: Paradigms for inflections, and Abstract Descriptions

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The first is to create functions that can generate regular inflections for all kinds of words and languages.

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These can then be used for the lexicographic content in Wikidata

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Or for the inflection tables in the Wiktionaries.

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But instead of having the inflections implemented in 160 or so Wiktionaries independently (in templates, modules, or manually), 

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we implement it in Wikifunctions and make it available for all Wiktionaries, and also for Wikidata and for Abstract Wikipedia!

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Abstract Descriptions

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In Wikidata, every Item has a description in every language.

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Before we can generate whole articles for Abstract Wikipedia, we will be able to generate noun phrases.

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And descriptions? They are usually noun phrases. So we aim to make Abstract Descriptions for Wikidata another early milestone.

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This year we are focusing on developing Wikifunctions.

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In 2022 we will start adding a focus on Abstract Wikipedia, working on the early milestones, Paradigms and Abstract Descriptions

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And in 2023 we would finally get to the place where we can create Abstract Content

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and where we will be able to read and contribute to that content across many different languages, 

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where we have a truly multilingual Wikipedia, getting so much closer to a world,

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Where everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge.

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Thank you for your attention