> 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.
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.
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/