Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2021-06-30/da

Abstrakte Wikipedia-opdateringer

Phase ε completed.

When we started the development effort towards the Wikifunctions site, we subdivided the work leading up to the launch of Wikifunctions into eleven phases, named after the first eleven letters of the Greek alphabet.

With Phase α (alpha) completed, it became possible to create instances of the system-provided Types in the wiki.
With Phase β (beta), it became possible to create new Types on-wiki and to create instances of these Types.
With Phase γ (gamma), all the main Types of the pre-generic function model were available.
With Phase δ (delta). It became possible to evaluate built-in implementations.
This week, we completed Phase ε (epsilon).

The goal of Phase ε has been to provide the capability to evaluate contributor-written implementations in a programming language.

Hvad betyder dette? Every function in Wikifunctions can have several implementations. There are three different ways to express an implementation:

As a built-in function, written by the development team: this means that the implementation is handled by the evaluator as a black box.
As code in a programming language, created by the contributors of Wikifunctions: the implementation of a function can be given in any programming language that Wikifunctions supports. Eventually we aim to support a large number of programming languages, but we will start small.
As a composition of other functions: this means that contributors can use existing functions as building blocks in order to implement new capabilities.

In Phase ε, we extended the infrastructure for evaluating functions to allow for the running of contributed code in addition to the built-ins from Phase δ. For now, we support two programming languages: JavaScript and Python. We plan to add more programming languages (most familiar to the Wikimedia community, Lua) and we will document a process for requesting the support of additional programming languages. We implemented the planned architecture:

We have now a system where the orchestrator receives the function call to be evaluated, gathers all necessary data from Wikifunctions and potential other resources, and then chooses the corresponding evaluators that can run the given programming language. Since this is contributor-created code, we are very careful about where and how to run the code, and which capabilities to give to the virtual machine that runs the code. For example, no network access and no persistence layer is allowed, in order to reduce the potential for security issues.

A security review and a separate performance review of our architecture and implementation are currently ongoing. Once we have dealt with the most pressing issues that are uncovered by the reviews, we plan to provide a demonstration system. This will probably be in the next Phase.

The next screenshot shows us an implementation of the Function “Concatenate”. A concatenate function takes two strings as its arguments and returns a single string consisting of the two input strings joined end-to-end. Our implementation uses JavaScript’s native concat method, which is provided by JavaScript’s string object.

The next screenshot shows the function being called using the arguments “Wiki“ and “functions”, resulting in the string “Wikifunctions”.

We are now moving on to Phase ζ (zeta). The goal of this Phase will be to allow for the third type of implementations: the composition of functions in order to build new capabilities. This will also be the first Phase to really highlight the advantages of our system for contributing implementations in non-English languages. We have published a few examples of composed implementations. The example implementation of common Boolean functions might be particularly instructive. Phase ζ is the last of the trilogy of Phases dealing with the different ways to create an implementation.

During this Phase and subsequent ones, we will also spend some time to reduce technical debt that we accumulated in rushed development during the last two phases in order to be ready for the security and performance reviews. We also expect to begin early changes based on our user research and design development, replacing the current bare-bones user experience.

Structurally, Phase ζ aims to be the turning point of the development towards Wikifunctions. It will set us up with a system that is powerful enough to allow for its own refactoring in order to support generic types and functions in Phase η (eta), and then to implement monitoring, UX, security, and documentation. All the core technical capabilities should be in place by then, and then we will need to add the necessary supporting systems that will allow us to launch Wikifunctions.

Last week saw the Arctic Knot conference, which was about the future of indigenous and underrepresented languages and their presence and use on the Wikimedia projects. I want to point to a few talks that are potentially particularly interesting to the Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions community:

Mahir talked on preparing languages for natural language generation using Wikidata lexicographical data
Denny gave an introductory presentation on Abstract Wikipedia and suggestions on what tasks we want to tackle first
Sadik and Mohammed talked in Dagbani Wikipedia Bachinima about challenges and successes of growing the project, including the Spell4Wiki app

Thanks everyone for attending, presenting at, and organizing the event!

We close with a reminder that there is an invitation to attend for free the Grammatical Framework Summer School from 26 July to 6 August 2021.

The language committee has approved the creation of the Dagbani language Wikipedia. Dagbani is one of our focus languages, and has been the only one of the five that has been in Incubator. Congratulations to the Dagbani community!

Next week there will be no newsletter.