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Welcome to Wikifunctions

wikifunctions.org

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Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#151

Post by bawolff »

tgv wrote: post #144
andybak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. This feels like someone has taken a Borges parody and ran with it: > 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…

THAT's the reason? Conveying a sentence as a series of propositions or a tree with case labels has been tried in the previous century, without success. It does not offer a good basis for translation, as e.g. Philips' Rosetta project showed. It works for simple cases, but as soon as the text becomes more complex, it runs into all the horrible little details that make up language. A simple example: in Spanish you don't…

> It might work for highly technical, unambiguous, simple content

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.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#152

Post by bawolff »

nonethewiser wrote: post #91
bawolff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you're not the only one to think that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

So Wikipedia asks me for donations but does company off-sites in Switzerland with Google?

I think a lot of abstract wikipedia is coming from restricted grants not the general donation pool.

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.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#153

Post by guy98238710 »

vasco wrote: post #53
guy98238710 wrote: post #25

Wikifunctions is primarily intended to support Wikimedia projects, especially Abstract Wikipedia. It is the code complement to Wikidata lexemes. It might be used for cross-wiki templates to reduce existing duplication and other auxiliary tasks, but Abstract Wikipedia is the reason it was proposed.

Abstract Wikipedia is in my opinion fully wasted work. Translation is free and instant for web pages. I've lived for 6 years in different countries where I don't speak the local language (and am also not native English speaking) and you can get all the information you need by translating. This works totally fine already today with Google translate on top of pages. And the pages that are in fact missing from "the othe…

You might well be right. Furthermore, English is on its way to become the universal language everyone speaks. You are however wrong about comparing AW to translators, which are probabilistic algorithms whereas AW is intended to be as exact as Wolfram Alpha. AW should be also able to use Wikidata to generate unique articles that do not exist even in English.

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.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#154

Post by andybak »

bawolff wrote: post #151
tgv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THAT's the reason? Conveying a sentence as a series of propositions or a tree with case labels has been tried in the previous century, without success. It does not offer a good basis for translation, as e.g. Philips' Rosetta project showed. It works for simple cases, but as soon as the text becomes more complex, it runs into all the horrible little details that make up language. A simple example: in Spanish you don't…

> It might work for highly technical, unambiguous, simple content 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.

But it seems like a huge amount of work to achieve that goal.

I suspect a large proportion of the realistic target audience are bilingual.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#155

Post by Levitz »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #145
Levitz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s literally just advocating for including the wide and varied history of algorithm development, in order to encourage readers from many different backgrounds to find ways to connect with the important topic. I'm at a loss of words for what I feel towards respecting (even promoting!) the idea that a piece of knowledge ought to become interesting or valuable if there is ethnic relationship to it. It reeks of suprem…

[flagged]

Feigning ignorance? I am explicit in pointing how minorities tend to get a special deal when it comes to supremacist talk. I just don't condone it. I don't believe that glorification based on race is something you can keep to certain races. I am simply not racist about racism.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#157

Post by 8bitsrule »

andersa wrote: post #44

This has to be one of the most confusing documentation sites I have ever seen. Maybe I just don't get it, since I never edited Wikipedia. Opening some of the pages at random, like https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z828 https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z110 There's a "try this function" section, which I couldn't get to take any sort of input on a few tries. It always ended up with a field that said "no result…

I spent a few minutes scanning the 'intro' pages. If there were any function examples there, I missed it/them.

A simple example or five of what in the hell a function can do might motivate some readers to want to dig deeper. I don't want to today.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#158

Post by pests »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #126

So I spent what amounts to almost an hour today being amazed and entertained by the perceiced absurdity of this. Now, after a good dinner, reading the FAQ again, I'm starting to roughly feel like this might actually make sense, in another world, or maybe it might even make sense in reality when better fleshed-out? And also I start to remember what this reminds me of (plenty of other entertaining references already he…

Wow I haven't seen thedailywtf in a long time. I used to read it daily back when Google Reader was still around.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#159

Post by pests »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #127
andersa wrote: post #44

This has to be one of the most confusing documentation sites I have ever seen. Maybe I just don't get it, since I never edited Wikipedia. Opening some of the pages at random, like https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z828 https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z110 There's a "try this function" section, which I couldn't get to take any sort of input on a few tries. It always ended up with a field that said "no result…

https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu... > We are not competing with sites such as gist, or sites such as [...] esolangs.org

Somehow that still doesnt give enough counter examples to figure out what it is.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#160

Post by tgv »

bawolff wrote: post #151
tgv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THAT's the reason? Conveying a sentence as a series of propositions or a tree with case labels has been tried in the previous century, without success. It does not offer a good basis for translation, as e.g. Philips' Rosetta project showed. It works for simple cases, but as soon as the text becomes more complex, it runs into all the horrible little details that make up language. A simple example: in Spanish you don't…

> It might work for highly technical, unambiguous, simple content 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.

The original paper [0] envisages a much wider scope. Vrandecic literally quotes "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge".

It also makes the task of the editor much, much more difficult than it is now.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.04733.pdf

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