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Welcome to Wikifunctions

wikifunctions.org

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Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#71

Post by _v7gu »

andybak wrote: post #68
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...

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…

Reads even worse than Ulillillia literature, at least he doesn’t fully yield to scientific measurements

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#72

Post by trashburger »

sneak wrote: post #62
nologic01 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's apples and oranges though. Tor is out of control of the US military as this point (+/- your tinfoil hat level), whereas Google Translate was created and is owned solely by Google. I'm not saying GP is fully correct but context is important.

I personally think using transformers for, well, transforming input into another language is going to be a great approach once hardware catches up for local offline use at a reasonable speed and hallucinations are minimized.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#73

Post by nologic01 »

vasco wrote: post #67
nologic01 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Abstracting the knowledge away is wasted work

Translation solves an immediate problem of giving human users a glimpse of Wikipedias knowledge base, but it is still stricly wrapped in textual data. It is still a content black box that, e.g an LLM would not make more transparent.

Abstraction builds a mathematical representation. Its a new product and it opens up new use cases that have nothing to do with translation. It may on occasion be more factually correct than a translation, or may be used in conjuction with translation, but is potentially a far more flexible and versatile technology.

The challege is really matching ambition and vision with resources and execution. Especially if it is to attract volunteers to crowdsource the enormous task, it needs to have a very clear and attractive onboarding ramp. The somewhat related Wikidata / wikibase projects seem to have a reasonable fan base so there is precedent.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#74

Post by trashburger »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #57

Has anyone figured out how to input lists? It shows inputs for selecting the type of each element of a list, but when I select a type like "String" the type input field is empty again. When I do not enter anything, but click the "dropdown arrow" right of the field, the field becomes grayed out and empty again. Not sure how to use this.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates...

> Initially, we will support two pre-defined Types for the inputs and outputs of Functions: Strings and Booleans. The creation of new Types will at first be restricted to staff members.

Seems like no list support yet.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#75

Post by js8 »

johnnyworker wrote: post #42
js8 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation. Basically, you don't understand that "decolonization" is a metaphor for a broader historical perspective, and instead you're trying to interpret it literally and in a bad faith.

What "outrage"? Might as well ask why you are going insane with hatred over a simple question. How would that feel? Would you even bother to respond to something like that?

I responded in attempt to explain the viewpoint of the other side, by using an analogy (that can be familiar to people who do computers). There is no "insane hatred" in my response, on the contrary, I was trying to expand the PP's perspective.

PP seemed to be concerned about the word "decolonization" specifically, rather than the actual goal of properly organizing the history, and seemed annoyed by it enough to comment here. I would say that justifies it to be called an "outrage", but it's hard to defend or concede now that it has been flagged. I think were they not outraged, they can simply ignore my comment as irrelevant, and they are also welcome to clarify whatever objections they have with respect to that project.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#76

Post by capableweb »

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…

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

Abstract Wikipedia authors/editors/developers is the target audience. As far as I can gather, this Wikifunctions is supposed to be a store for functions used to generate text based on data, so things can be written once and "automatically" translated to many languages, meaning you can cover more by stating "facts" and matching them to outputted language somehow.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#77

Post by nologic01 »

sneak wrote: post #62
nologic01 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Corporate entities come and go. They bait-and-switch at will as they are ultimately only answering to legal obligations and in particular shareholders. It would be odd to overlay such a liability and uncertainty on top of wikipedia.

While abstraction is not the same as translation, if the wikipedia community wants specifically a translation service that is more tightly integrated into the platform imho it should be a fully open source project.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#78

Post by civilized »

js8 wrote: post #26
raincole wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also got mad at Git for having default branch named master.

Yeah, and it was misguided and irrelevant all the same. People who actually use Git understand that "master" is a metaphor, just like people who are concerned about historical views being represented understand that "decolonization" is also a metaphor for this due dilligence. Context is everything. You're not gonna be killed by Unix command, enslaved by Github, and the land you own is not going to be confiscated by p…

The difference is that "master" doesn't actually imply the existence of slaves in English, while "decolonization" does literally imply that there is some sort of colonialism that is being undone.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#79

Post by _dain_ »

andybak wrote: post #68
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...

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…

this is the kind of unhinged make-work schemes all those wikipedia beg banners are funding

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#80

Post by chrisjj »

I was about to say I stopped reading at:

> the creation of new development environments or programming languages or paradigms will become easier, as they could simply refer to Wikilambda for a vast library of functions.

... except morbid curiosity compelled me to the end.

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