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> The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses conceptual models t
by memexy 6y ago
> The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, it should be possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge to create models for articles that also have universal value. Using code, volunteers will be able to translate these abstract “articles” into their own languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to read about any topic in Wikidata in their own language.
This is a great idea. I bet the translations will be interesting as well. I was wondering about how the translation was going to work and it looks like they thought of that as well. They're going to use code to help with the translation.
> Wikilambda is a new Wikimedia project that allows to create and maintain code. This is useful in many different ways. It provides a catalog of all kind of functions that anyone can call, write, maintain, and use. It also provides code that translates the language-independent article from Abstract Wikipedia into the language of a Wikipedia. This allows everyone to read the article in their language. Wikilambda will use knowledge about words and entities from Wikidata.
- zozbot234 6y agoPretty-printing the abstract content into an arbitrary target language (a better way of putting it than "translation") would be quite the challenge, because "conceptual models" do vary by language. One can attempt to come up with something that's "as abstract/universal as possible" but it remains to be seen how practically useful that would be. For that matter, making the source model "logical" and "compositional", as implied by the Wikilambda idea, only opens up further cans of worms. Linguists and cognitive scientists have explored the idea of a "logical" semantics for natural language, even drawing on the λ-calculus itself (e.g. in Montague grammar and Montague semantics), but one can be sure that a lot of complexity will be involved in trying to express realistic notions by relying on anything like that.
- memexy 6y agoI didn't assume the translations would be lossless. It's obvious there will be conceptual mismatches but that's why this is interesting. Because when the abstract model is made concrete people can notice the gaps and improve the abstract model. I can imagine a feedback loop that improves both the abstract and concrete/translated models as people work on improving both to reduce the conceptual gaps between the abstract and concrete models.
- numpad0 6y agoI’m starting to feel the structure and content of “abstract content” is going to be quite like Wikipedia pages in target languages zipped into single archive plus overheads...