Abstract Wikipedia/Summary
| Abstract Wikipedia |
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| Development plan |
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| Notes, drafts, discussions |
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| Examples & mockups |
| Data tools |
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- This is part of the development plan for a wiki of functions.
 | This proposal is a draft and it is expected to see significant changes based on decisions and discussions with the communities and other stakeholders. Which, in turn, also means that comments and discussions are more than welcome in order to improve and shape the proposal. |
In Abstract Wikipedia, the “Abstract content” is represented in a language-independent format which is directly editable by the community. The local Wikipedias can access and enrich their own locally controlled content with “Abstract content” (from Abstract Wikipedia). This way, the localized editions of Wikipedia can with much less effort provide much more content to their readers, content that is more comprehensive, more current, and more vetted than what most local Wikipedias can provide.
Given research results and prototypes in the area of natural language generation, it is unfortunately true that natural language generation from the language-independent “Abstract content” requires a “Turing-complete” system. But in order to cover the number of languages Wikipedia needs to cover, this system must be crowdsourced. Therefore we introduce Wikifunctions, a project to create, catalog, and maintain an open library (or repository) of “functions”, which has many possible use cases.
The primary motivation for Wikifunctions is the development of “renderers” (i.e. some of the functions hosted or referenced in Wikifunctions) that turn the language-independent “Abstract content” into natural language, using the linguistic and ontological knowledge available in Wikidata (or knowledge from other suitable open data sources, including possibly data from other Wikimedia projects like Wiktionary or Wikispecies).
The project will start with creating the Wikifunctions project, and then use this in order to enable the creation of Abstract Wikipedia. Wikifunctions will launch within the first year, and we will add the development of Abstract Wikipedia in the second year. After two years, we will have created an ecosystem that allows for the creation and maintenance of language-independent “Abstract content”, and the integration of this content within the Wikipedias, significantly increasing coverage, currency, and accuracy of many individual Wikipedias. This will move us dramatically closer to a world where everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge.
- Continued in name of the wiki of functions.