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Welcome to Wikifunctions

wikifunctions.org

61–70 of 179 posts

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#61
post #52
post #34

I couldn't find a function for which the implementation is visible. Which leaves me quite confused about what exactly the nature of this wiki is.

The implementation is in the 'details' tab, but even still this project is very confusing.

All of the details tabs I checked had a message saying that the implementation was hidden.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#62
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is wrong on two counts: 1) translation is not the same as abstraction and 2) having the world's encyclopedia translated by an advertising company is not exactly everybody's idea for how things should be organized Of course wrong criticism doesnt mean the project is a success (i think its been going for a few years now). The documentation in particular does not highlight what this infrastructure is good for.

"translated by an advertising company" is akin to "Tor was funded by the US government" - it's basically organizational ad hominem.

Google's translations are fine and are high quality and don't yet (or in the foreseeable future) inject ad copy into the translations (like they do on eg Google Maps for POIs).

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#63
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't quite work. If nobody has told you about the cafe, the probability that it is awesome should not be zero. Perhaps you only define the trust function from n=1+

Good point! The formula indeed assumes a base probability of zero. That's actually why I put "The best cafe ever" in there and that it is called an "exceptionally awesome cafe". I got a bit lax later in the text just calling it "awesome". For a cafe aficionado, who spends most of their time in cafes, reading HN and thinking about formulas, the probability that some random cafe becomes their new favorite is virtually…

I think Laplace's Rule of succession [1] could be better here. It assumes there are binary "successes" and "failures" (e.g. thumbs up/down). Let s be the number of "successes", n be the total number of data points (successes+failures), and 1/x the prior probability of a success. Then the probability that the next data point will be a success is:

(s + 1)/(n + x)

E.g. for prior probability 1/2 (success and failure initially equally likely), x=2, so

(s + 1)/(n + 2)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#64

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.

Talk about over engineering

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

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#66
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…

> Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?

That would be my biggest criticism too. It seems like the target audience and use cases are ill defined, vauge and hand wavey.

I dont think it knows really what it wants to be, other than definitely some sort of function store for abstract wikipedia, which also seems unnessarily complex.

Quite frankly i get massive wikidata-second-system vibes from the whole thing.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#67
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is wrong on two counts: 1) translation is not the same as abstraction and 2) having the world's encyclopedia translated by an advertising company is not exactly everybody's idea for how things should be organized Of course wrong criticism doesnt mean the project is a success (i think its been going for a few years now). The documentation in particular does not highlight what this infrastructure is good for.

My point is about translating after the fact by the end user solving the problem. Now you can use Google translate for free, later you can use your own LLM. Abstracting the knowledge away is wasted work. We already have it in a definitive source language (english for most things, local languages for local things).

This abstract Wikipedia sounds like Esperanto to me.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#68
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about over engineering

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

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 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.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#69
post #53

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…

Not to mention that machine translation became dramatically better with LLMs like GPT 4 and will just get better over time... rapidly.

I fully expect by next year for AI translation of Wiki-like content to be essentially perfect.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to view this formula is to use the fact that the Beta distribution is a conjugate prior for the binomial distribution. Essentially if you have a Beta(a, b) prior then your prior mean is a/(a+b) and after observing n samples from a Bernoulli distribution that are all positive, your posterior is Beta(a+n, b) with posterior mean (a+n)/(a+n+b). So in your example you effectively have a Beta(0, x) prior and x (“su…

Also, in case anyone is interested, the uninformative Jeffreys prior for this in Bayesian statistics (meaning it does not assume anything and is invariant to certain transformations of the inputs) is Beta(0.5, 0.5). Thus the initial guess is 0.5, and it evolves from there from the data.

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