7 ms·

Wikipedia Is Trying to Transcend the Limits of Human Language

61 points by mormegil 5y ago

syntaxfree 5y ago
One can almost hear Hubert Dreyfus going tsk tsk from the grave.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  It appears the only way discrete mathematicians will ever learn that intelligence isn't a problem in discrete mathematics is to build-it-and-fail.
  - tempodox 5y ago
    As of yet, it doesn't look like it has stopped the majority of those who want to sell us on “AI”. The definition of “failure” seems to be quite flexible.
kgeist 5y ago
The idea of a language-independent wikipedia seems to disregard the fact that language and our definitions are shaped by culture quite considerably. For example, what is the expected result of the query "how many colors are there in a rainbow?" For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue). Also, how are they going to deal with definitions which vary across jurisdictions, for example, trivia related to disputed territories?
- kgeist 5y ago
  Oh, the article mentions it, I missed it. It's an entirely optional thing so far.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Indeed, this misidentifies language and knowledge as some bizarre occasionalist game, On the occasion I generate the text, "who is the mayor of new york", I should receive the text, "antony cumio" (etc.). For extremely narrow questions with canonical answers in a canonical form (eg., how many protons are in a gold atom) this is fine. This works as a kind of coincidence: for these types of questions is a coincidence that their answers can be canonical. In general, language is a tool for navigating ones (principally social) environment. Absent this environment, mere text /has no meaning/. The question "what contributions did hegel make to philosophy?" has no canonical answer, and depends on a deep network of knowledge, belief, understanding and context which arises from being situated/embedded within some social environment. The question means something different if asked by an 14 year old, vs. a professional philosopher. And if asked by a scientist, or if asked by a janitor. Learning is a situated process, and language is a situated embedded phenomenon. Learning isnt acquiring a cannonical answer, it is a dialectical process of bridging the new meanings to the old ones you have acquired.
  - manquer 5y ago
    Not to quibble , you should receive Bill de Blassio as the current mayor of New York City . You are perhaps thinking of Andrew Cuomo who recently stepped down as governor of New York State in a sexual harassment scandal.
    - grlass 5y ago
      I guess that feeds into the cultural/temporal ambiguities of "what is new york?" and "what is a mayor". New York could be the state, and mayor could just be a word that means leader of an area. Perhaps that is getting too into the realm of deterritorialisation, but the point being that these concepts are context specific.
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        Or it might change what city has and there be small but distinct differences between Mayor and for example City manager. So at one point in time they have city manager and then after that mayor. These two being similar, but distinct roles... Not to even go defining what is a city...
- capableweb 5y ago
  What you're talking about is called Linguistic Relativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity), which can be solved by having "facts" vs "opinions" coded into the abstract version. So a rainbow has way more than 7 colors, but humans can only see bands of those colors really. Then depending on language, the answer will change. So the wikipedia page will (in both languages) tell all versions, leading to more culture share as we all can understand each other better.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > "facts" vs "opinions" coded into the abstract version Tell me. Who gets to decide what is a "fact" and what is an "opinion". An Israeli and a Palestinian would give you a different answer, just as one example.
    - femto 5y ago
      In that case Israeli/Palestinian would be an input to the function?
    - xvedejas 5y ago
      "The official Israeli position is X and the official Palestinian version is Y" might be one factual way to state opinions. You can choose exactly how much should be decided as "fact".
      - bloak 5y ago
        Not disagreeing with you so much as taking it a bit further ... It would be highly controversial to claim that any organisation has a valid mandate to represent the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government, in order to avoid angering a significant part of the their electorate, cannot offer a firm opinion on certain questions, such as where the borders of Israel are. And everyone's very fond of "stategic ambiguity" and "plausible deniability" and all that stuff. So your facts end up being something like: News outlet N claimed at time T1 that person P, claiming to represent organisation X, stated at time T2 something that can be accurately translated into language L as: ...
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  English native speakers (myself included) seem to have a real issue understanding that languages vary and aren’t all interchangeable collections of sounds. I blame the lack of bilingualism.
  - bluetomcat 5y ago
    Languages have deeply embedded in themselves the corresponding culture and world views. A phrase like "not my cup of tea" would sound hilarious at best in most other languages. Narratives are even more culture-dependent. The same sequence of events can be presented with entirely different causal relationships based on the values of the writer.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      >A phrase like "not my cup of tea" would sound hilarious at best in most other languages. Only if translated literally word for word
      - messe 5y ago
        Obviously. That was the commenters point.
        TchoBeer 5y ago
        The commenter's point was that there is information that can be expressed in one language but not another (they're not all essentially the same). The fact that you can't translate a figure of speech doesn't evidence this.
        Zababa 5y ago
        I don't want to put words into their mouth, but I think the comment was more about how we think depending on the language we use rather than the concept we're able to express or not.
      - 5y ago
- darkwater 5y ago
  > For example, what is the expected result of the query "how many colors are there in a rainbow?" For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue). That's true for Italian as well ("blu" and "azzurro", which is a light blue)
  - nathancahill 5y ago
    Same for Spanish (at least in LATAM): celeste and azul.
    - darkwater 5y ago
      Oh yeah in Italian there is also Celeste so there are three (although is pretty interchangeable with Azzurro)
  - wazoox 5y ago
    And French. Rouge Orangé Jaune Vert Bleu Violet Indigo.
  - ertomentis 5y ago
    Similar with Polish - blue is "niebieski", light-blue is "błękit" or, more rarely, "lazur"
- another-dave 5y ago
  Wow, never knew some people were taught 6 colours in a rainbow! — know it's just an example in your point, but what European cultures/languages use 6 instead of 7?
  - incompatible 5y ago
    I was taught it as "Roy G. Biv". I still remember what the letters stand for, but I don't remember the difference between indigo and violet.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      That's because there isn't a meaningful distinction between indigo (as a shade) and violet. IIRC, Isaac Newton thought it was important (for biblical numerology reasons) that there be 7 colors.
  - Lukas_Skywalker 5y ago
    German has 6, french has 7 though
  - ginko 5y ago
    I've never heard that rainbows are supposed to have a discrete number of colors.
    - another-dave 5y ago
      It's always been the standard abstract that I've heard to teach around it. In Ireland/UK it's something that gets brought up in primary and secondary schools, first when talking about rainbows and then later in discussions on optics/refraction — e.g. you'd get kids to make their own Newton's disc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_disc) and see colours blending together to white.
- bloak 5y ago
  In the longer term, "semantic drift" might also be a problem. The article keeps referring to the example of the mayor of San Francisco. But the definition of mayor (i.e. what the job involves) changes over time, and the definition of San Francisco (i.e. precise boundaries, legal status) changes over time. Perhaps in this case there haven't been and won't be any major changes during the period of history we care about, but if you define millions of these QIDs there will presumably be a constant flow of awkward language-dependent questions about what they should refer to.
  - adwn 5y ago
    How could this be any worse than tracking and updating those shifts of definition across thousands of articles in hundreds of different languages?
    - johnday 5y ago
      The point is that "mayors of San Fransisco" does not have a single answer, and therefore any answer WikiData provides will be glossing over a mountain of nuance and important distinctions in terminology. The same is true of a million million different individual and aggregated data points all across WikiData.
      - adwn 5y ago
        In the context of Wikipedia articles about the Western US city commonly called "San Francisco", the concept of "mayor" is sufficiently well defined that there is a single answer to it. The concerns voiced here sound a little like "What if in a hundred years, GPT-255 has subjugated all of humanity into a hive-mind and the terms 'San Francisco' and 'mayor' are meaningless?" Yes, well. One thing at a time.
        johnday 5y ago
        I was using the singular example from the parent comment. If it would convince you more, I will provide others - though I'm sure you could think of some yourself, if the mood took you.
- Angostura 5y ago
  > For example, what is the expected result of the query "how many colors are there in a rainbow? Wouldn't it be... For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue) But expanded somewhat?
- darkerside 5y ago
  Here's the crazy thing. Language is shaped by culture, yes. But culture of also shaped by language. WikiFunctions would essentially become a new language framework that could potentially impact culture. The things that WF values (being the only X to do Y), and that are readily expressible in that framework, could _potentially_ become the markers of success in modern culture. A cultural self-fulfilling prophecy.
- achow 5y ago
  I always thought it was 7 colours universally: VIBGYOR
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Do even English speakers know what "indigo" is?
    - occamrazor 5y ago
      The blue colour of blue jeans, which were originally made with indigo dye.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        There's a hint in there that maybe "indigo" is not really a word people use.
    - achow 5y ago
      Indigo is one of the oldest fabric dye. Wars were fought and nations survived on Indigo trade (ref: East India company)
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        So, no?
- inawarminister 5y ago
  Interesting In Indonesia (and related culture) we also have 7 Mejikuhibiniu Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple. We don't use indigo often in daily life though.
- markdown 5y ago
  > For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue). In my country, a former British colony, we learn the acronym ROYGBIV in school. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. 7 colours.
- uniqueid 5y ago
  I haven't looked at the spec, but presumably the model will output only a subset of any language. It seems pretty do-able providing there's the ability to add the (hopefully) rare sentence per-target-language manually. I actually hope Wikipedia, or someone, knocks it out of the park because it could form the basis of a new kind of web.
- spiraling_shape 5y ago
  From fifth-to-last paragraph of the article: Even if you accept the premise that an internet encyclopedia should be written from a neutral point of view, it is clear that some knowledge is contested within cultures, such as whether the population of Israel should include occupied and contested territories, or whether Catalonia is better described as a Spanish autonomous community or its own country. If more language editions relied on Abstract Wikipedia as the central source of truth, then this dominant point of view could replace alternative perspectives. But Vrandečić countered that each volunteer community could decide for itself whether Abstract Wikipedia should be used as a baseline. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, will not mandate that different language versions be forced to use the machine-readable, abstract version. That means that, for example, Hebrew Wikipedia and Arabic Wikipedia could each continue to present very different articles for the topic of Jerusalem.
- lakis 5y ago
  I think a better query is "how many types of snow exist"? On my experience, one, snow, period. Somebody living in north Canada, probably have more variations of the snow. In Eskimo language, there are ~300 words to express the variations of snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow Does this imply that every query about snow should be expressed in all these 300 variations of snow. Do I even know or care as a non-Eskimo speaker of all these variations?
  - lakis 5y ago
    We can always use the types of snow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_snow I count 6 types of snow 3 intensity of snowfall (which can also mean snow) 8 snow crystal classifications 4 types of snowpack material properties 7 wind induced snow structures 5 sun/temperature induced snow structure 9 ski resort classifications 7 informal classifications
qsort 5y ago
in re English wiki vs. other wikis: IME most people default to en.wiki unless they are looking for something very specific that the English language version doesn't cover. It's not surprising en.wiki gets the most attention, it's the one people actually use. For instance, I remember university professors routinely saying to never look up stuff on, in my case, it.wiki. That's good advice, as far as I'm concerned. > He imagines a future in which the human editors of Abstract Wikipedia are not only writing functions using computer code, but are also able to communicate with one another via that code. vaste programme > “All of those examples [of universal languages] are failures, all of them didn’t work out,” Vrandečic told me. “So why do we think we have a chance? [Because] we’re creating a framework where we have thousands of people working on this problem, not just a single person or some very small group [...]” He's completely wrong about the reason. Code as a language doesn't work out because the apparent correspondence between the two is in fact only superficial. Natural language is not formal, it doesn't attempt to be formal, and it doesn't need to be formal. I don't think adding more people is going to solve any of that.
- kgeist 5y ago
  >IME most people default to en.wiki unless they are looking for something very specific that the English language version doesn't cover. It's not surprising en.wiki gets the most attention, it's the one people actually use. That's a pretty wrong generalization. It depends on the country, whether they speak English well enough and if their national wikipedia is big enough (Scandinavian countries, maybe?). In Russia, for example, almost no one reads the English version. I assume it's the case in France as well. Also I've seen friends of mine from Germany exchange mostly German wiki links between themselves.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  People in France or Japan or most other countries don’t default to the English language version of Wikipedia.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I can confirm for France, the French edition of Wikipedia is usually good, especially for science-related topics and local things.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
If more language editions relied on Abstract Wikipedia as the central source of truth, then this dominant point of view could replace alternative perspectives. But Vrandečić countered that each volunteer community could decide for itself whether Abstract Wikipedia should be used as a baseline. That sounds about as likely as “every country can decide whether to be affected by English-language media.” This drive toward constant universalization is scary and it’s only going to make Wikipedia even more of a Western worldview project. We need to be heading in the opposite direction. You can be certain that China or India or whomever else will block Wikipedia rather than let western NGOs continue to define the narratives in their respective countries.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  It also leaves open the later mandate of removing opt-in. One can easily imagine a large international crisis where truth is relative depending on where you are but where writing about something might be deemed as dangerous and harmful misinformation which has to be erased. Imagine Wikipedia during WW2 for example for conflict. It's an inverse tower of babel situation - a kind of hubris where the aim of reducing differences leads to a greater evil. The hubris is that clever westerners think its possible to fit everyone into the same way of mind and if that happens then they will touch heaven.
- Isinlor 5y ago
  China already blocks Wikipedia since 2015 and has it's own communist world view project. I don't see how Wikipedia can accommodate Chinese world view were facts are denied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia#Blocking_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia#Blocking_of_... Wikipedia should absolutely remain Western world view project.
traceroute66 5y ago
"Trying to Transcend the Limits of Human Language" or is it rather "Using algorithms to transform Wikipedia into a politically correct entity based on unknown deciders of what is correct" ? The article already alludes to many cases where this simply won't work due to the realities of needing to take local context into account. Otherwise you'll only end up annoying (very) large groups of people, both amongst your contributors and externally, for no reason other than your desire to be politically correct.
smeej 5y ago
I'm confused as to how Cebuano Wikipedia ever got Diane Feinstein listed as San Francisco mayor in the first place if her tenure ended in 1988. Wasn't 1988 well before the creation of Cebuano Wikipedia? This data would have been significantly out of date even at the time it was added.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Sounds like it imported an outdated database of global geography / politics.
Zababa 5y ago
More influence from the USA? That's really what we needed from Wikipedia. > But Vrandečić countered that each volunteer community could decide for itself whether Abstract Wikipedia should be used as a baseline. So a few people in the "volunteer community" will decide which biais one of the biggest source of information online will follow? > Throughout this year’s Wikimania, a number of volunteers expressed concern that English was becoming the lingua franca of the movement, and that English Wikipedia was receiving more attention than its counterparts. Vrandečic suspects that Abstract Wikipedia could help with this problem, too. How? Code is written in English, its documentation in English, the resources in English. Unless we do pure lambda calculus or something like that. I'm going to be very skeptic here, but this sounds like a power-grabbing move. That is, some people in Wikipedia want to leverage the power they already have even more. I know how strong the idea of "making things right with tech" can be, but sometimes that's not the correct answer, and this is one of those cases.
- yorwba 5y ago
  > Unless we do pure lambda calculus or something like that. Yes, that's the plan. The Wikilambda project was renamed to Wikifunctions (probably because not many people know what "lambda" means in this context), but they kept the logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikifunctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikifunctions Wikidata already demonstrates that language-agnostic knowledge representation works, it's just that it feels like a giant listing of disjointed facts. The new initiative is about turning that into something that wouldn't feel out of place in a human-written Wikipedia article.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Sure, but most of the mindshare will still navigate around English. Look at the number of languages for the introduction https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction, and then look at the Tours https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tours https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tours. Already here we see a massive reduction in the number of languages. I think that the more specialized the information on Wikifunctions or Wikidata becomes, the fewer language choices there will be. This means it could appeal mostly to bilingual or English native audiences. Programming is already very focused on English. I don't think you can build something for people all over the world if most of the people actually building this thing can all communicate with each other in the same language. That's one of the moments where diversity in teams is very powerful: if your team is only composed of people that can understand and express themselves in English, the people that can't won't be served well by your product. Of course you could encode "In this culture, X is Y and in this culture, X is Z", but at this point why not just keep the encyclopedia like it is right now?
wrnr 5y ago
I've studied Lojban for 2 days in the naive attempt to use it for knowledge base technology but then saw a talk about a poem by Lewis Carol translated to Lojban and dropped that effort because it is human unfriendly. The choice of using function is at least an improvement over triplet based systems like Lojban and RDF, similar how Wolfram Alfa uses glorified s-expressions to have a heterogeneous language for data and computations. That said I really think the final point of the article is the most important, Wikipedia lacks a user friendly way of editing and should really have a WYSIWYG editor to appeal to a wider audience of contributors. From talking to engineers at Wikipedia I understand this has in part to do with wikiscript and all the extensions used result in a language that is context dependent and can't be parsed but must be executed while parsing, sort of like human language. Haha. Anyway I think the situation is lame and they should use their 100 million endowment to build a web editor. If you like contact me I've used prose-mirror.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  wikipedia has a WYSIWYG editor enabled on most wikis for several years now. Its often the default editor. I prefer using it. It's called the visual editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor It must have been almost a decade ago since you talked to the engineers, as the alpha version was released in 2012. Time really does fly!
  - wrnr 5y ago
    Yes that true it was a long time ago. I checked it now, and it looks decent, but still they should not hide it so well.
ricardo81 5y ago
Interesting read and topic. Seems like the primary driver is utilising all the effort put into the English wiki for other languages and also avoiding potentially redundant extra work. I appreciate the prose that Wikipedia tends to have and hopefully their more structured approach to 'facts' doesn't change that. I've used wiki(pedia|data) datasets, the former for article summaries and latter for knowledge panel facts. Seemed like they've tinkered with something called 'templates' in the past, where things like population wouldn't be in the markup, but reference another page/key where the data actually is (see enwiki for Greece if interested). Was a bit of a pain writing a parser for it especially when these things change so often and as it turns out the population has reverted back to being plaintext in the article. Would call myself a Layman, though my humble suggestion would be that statements could potentially be tagged with wikidataids of the things/events that are mentioned in them. Potentially that could make updates easier and wikidata has translations of entities that are much less subject to literary license. Potentially this could make it easier to translate to other languages. Definitely seems like a large rabbit hole to get into, as you could then go onto have simple language rules like is|was when someone is no longer alive, do-able if the wikidata entity is tagged to the statement. Interesting stuff to think about nonetheless, and noting other comments that some 'facts' are subject to interpretation.
streamofdigits 5y ago
just like biodiversity is wealth and monoculture is risk, wikidiversity is a bonus, not a problem. mapping the human condition into abstract data can never be "neutral". that map is inherently and unavoidably biased. wikipedia is about the only major online site / project that retains a bit of good karma, it would be a pity if its meager resources get squandered chasing open ended projects with ill-defined criteria for success. it might be best (at least in the short term and while the world still sorts out whether and what kind of future we'll have) to leverage the good work in wikidata but only focus on information concerning the natural world - where those biased mappings (while still there) are of a less immediate concern...
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > it would be a pity if its meager resources get squandered chasing open ended projects with ill-defined criteria for success. How so? The closest equivalent to this project was Wikidata itself, and that has been wildly successful beyond anyone's expectations. Besides Wikipedia itself and other WM projects, every Big Tech software assistant is relying on it.
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    wikidata is an incredible powerful concept (the early success / adoption in technically savvy circles hints as much) but developing the fullness of its potential will require a lot of further work on both technical matters, content, usability and transparency / governance / acceptance by world-wide users. abstract wikipedia and related directions are (imho obviously) mission creep, raising the bar to possibly unrealistic heights and thus creating the conditions for criticism of what is (I repeat) one of the few unambiguously good online platforms out there... Afterthought: a premonition of the rise and fall of mozilla (and the string of its failed projects). surveillance capitalists can waste billions at "moonshoots" but non-profits must justify every penny. this is the world we live in, alas
otikik 5y ago
I strongly doubt that "Catalonia the country" vs "Catalonia the autonomous community" is a problem that you can "solve" with an algorithm of any kind. The best you can aim for is finding and displaying the inconsistencies.
toolslive 5y ago
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2521 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2521
shp0ngle 5y ago
As an occasional Wikipedia editor, I loathe WikiData. It's confusing, overly complex and nobody really understands it. It smells of "top down" design, instead of "bottoms up" organic way of wikipedia. Luckily I have to interact with it only occasionally (but it's usually always painful). I hope this won't be a continuation of that.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I think it will be a continuation of that. That whole idea smell of a "top down" design that nobody really asked for.
softgrow 5y ago
If only Wikidata was easier to use. It is terrific to use across different language articles, but it is for most, including me challenging even to start using.
Ansil849 5y ago
> A simple function might involve calculating how many days have passed between someone’s date of birth and date of death. What kind of days? Sidereal (stellar) days? Solar days?
leobg 5y ago
It’s quite obvious to me that this is the holy Grail of natural language processing: A representation of real world knowledge which can be updated from human language, and which can be automatically translated into human language. That would also mean: If you write a novel, then you can change one fact, and the entire novel will automatically update to reflect that change. So that’s basically what Wikipedia this after.
wikiuser1 5y ago
Reading articles on any XX-XXI centuries event in English and Russian is fascinating. Try Iraq or US Argan war for example. Reading both or more will give you a bigger picture. Same in math and physics.

61 points by mormegil 5y ago

syntaxfree 5y ago

One can almost hear Hubert Dreyfus going tsk tsk from the grave.

mjburgess 5y ago
It appears the only way discrete mathematicians will ever learn that intelligence isn't a problem in discrete mathematics is to build-it-and-fail.
- tempodox 5y ago
  As of yet, it doesn't look like it has stopped the majority of those who want to sell us on “AI”. The definition of “failure” seems to be quite flexible.

kgeist 5y ago

The idea of a language-independent wikipedia seems to disregard the fact that language and our definitions are shaped by culture quite considerably. For example, what is the expected result of the query "how many colors are there in a rainbow?" For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue). Also, how are they going to deal with definitions which vary across jurisdictions, for example, trivia related to disputed territories?

kgeist 5y ago
Oh, the article mentions it, I missed it. It's an entirely optional thing so far.
mjburgess 5y ago
Indeed, this misidentifies language and knowledge as some bizarre occasionalist game, On the occasion I generate the text, "who is the mayor of new york", I should receive the text, "antony cumio" (etc.). For extremely narrow questions with canonical answers in a canonical form (eg., how many protons are in a gold atom) this is fine. This works as a kind of coincidence: for these types of questions is a coincidence that their answers can be canonical. In general, language is a tool for navigating ones (principally social) environment. Absent this environment, mere text /has no meaning/. The question "what contributions did hegel make to philosophy?" has no canonical answer, and depends on a deep network of knowledge, belief, understanding and context which arises from being situated/embedded within some social environment. The question means something different if asked by an 14 year old, vs. a professional philosopher. And if asked by a scientist, or if asked by a janitor. Learning is a situated process, and language is a situated embedded phenomenon. Learning isnt acquiring a cannonical answer, it is a dialectical process of bridging the new meanings to the old ones you have acquired.
- manquer 5y ago
  Not to quibble , you should receive Bill de Blassio as the current mayor of New York City . You are perhaps thinking of Andrew Cuomo who recently stepped down as governor of New York State in a sexual harassment scandal.
  - grlass 5y ago
    I guess that feeds into the cultural/temporal ambiguities of "what is new york?" and "what is a mayor". New York could be the state, and mayor could just be a word that means leader of an area. Perhaps that is getting too into the realm of deterritorialisation, but the point being that these concepts are context specific.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Or it might change what city has and there be small but distinct differences between Mayor and for example City manager. So at one point in time they have city manager and then after that mayor. These two being similar, but distinct roles... Not to even go defining what is a city...
capableweb 5y ago
What you're talking about is called Linguistic Relativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity), which can be solved by having "facts" vs "opinions" coded into the abstract version. So a rainbow has way more than 7 colors, but humans can only see bands of those colors really. Then depending on language, the answer will change. So the wikipedia page will (in both languages) tell all versions, leading to more culture share as we all can understand each other better.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > "facts" vs "opinions" coded into the abstract version Tell me. Who gets to decide what is a "fact" and what is an "opinion". An Israeli and a Palestinian would give you a different answer, just as one example.
  - femto 5y ago
    In that case Israeli/Palestinian would be an input to the function?
  - xvedejas 5y ago
    "The official Israeli position is X and the official Palestinian version is Y" might be one factual way to state opinions. You can choose exactly how much should be decided as "fact".
    - bloak 5y ago
      Not disagreeing with you so much as taking it a bit further ... It would be highly controversial to claim that any organisation has a valid mandate to represent the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government, in order to avoid angering a significant part of the their electorate, cannot offer a firm opinion on certain questions, such as where the borders of Israel are. And everyone's very fond of "stategic ambiguity" and "plausible deniability" and all that stuff. So your facts end up being something like: News outlet N claimed at time T1 that person P, claiming to represent organisation X, stated at time T2 something that can be accurately translated into language L as: ...
ceilingcorner 5y ago
English native speakers (myself included) seem to have a real issue understanding that languages vary and aren’t all interchangeable collections of sounds. I blame the lack of bilingualism.
- bluetomcat 5y ago
  Languages have deeply embedded in themselves the corresponding culture and world views. A phrase like "not my cup of tea" would sound hilarious at best in most other languages. Narratives are even more culture-dependent. The same sequence of events can be presented with entirely different causal relationships based on the values of the writer.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    >A phrase like "not my cup of tea" would sound hilarious at best in most other languages. Only if translated literally word for word
    - messe 5y ago
      Obviously. That was the commenters point.
      - TchoBeer 5y ago
        The commenter's point was that there is information that can be expressed in one language but not another (they're not all essentially the same). The fact that you can't translate a figure of speech doesn't evidence this.
        Zababa 5y ago
        I don't want to put words into their mouth, but I think the comment was more about how we think depending on the language we use rather than the concept we're able to express or not.
    - 5y ago
darkwater 5y ago
> For example, what is the expected result of the query "how many colors are there in a rainbow?" For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue). That's true for Italian as well ("blu" and "azzurro", which is a light blue)
- nathancahill 5y ago
  Same for Spanish (at least in LATAM): celeste and azul.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    Oh yeah in Italian there is also Celeste so there are three (although is pretty interchangeable with Azzurro)
- wazoox 5y ago
  And French. Rouge Orangé Jaune Vert Bleu Violet Indigo.
- ertomentis 5y ago
  Similar with Polish - blue is "niebieski", light-blue is "błękit" or, more rarely, "lazur"
another-dave 5y ago
Wow, never knew some people were taught 6 colours in a rainbow! — know it's just an example in your point, but what European cultures/languages use 6 instead of 7?
- incompatible 5y ago
  I was taught it as "Roy G. Biv". I still remember what the letters stand for, but I don't remember the difference between indigo and violet.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    That's because there isn't a meaningful distinction between indigo (as a shade) and violet. IIRC, Isaac Newton thought it was important (for biblical numerology reasons) that there be 7 colors.
- Lukas_Skywalker 5y ago
  German has 6, french has 7 though
- ginko 5y ago
  I've never heard that rainbows are supposed to have a discrete number of colors.
  - another-dave 5y ago
    It's always been the standard abstract that I've heard to teach around it. In Ireland/UK it's something that gets brought up in primary and secondary schools, first when talking about rainbows and then later in discussions on optics/refraction — e.g. you'd get kids to make their own Newton's disc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_disc) and see colours blending together to white.
bloak 5y ago
In the longer term, "semantic drift" might also be a problem. The article keeps referring to the example of the mayor of San Francisco. But the definition of mayor (i.e. what the job involves) changes over time, and the definition of San Francisco (i.e. precise boundaries, legal status) changes over time. Perhaps in this case there haven't been and won't be any major changes during the period of history we care about, but if you define millions of these QIDs there will presumably be a constant flow of awkward language-dependent questions about what they should refer to.
- adwn 5y ago
  How could this be any worse than tracking and updating those shifts of definition across thousands of articles in hundreds of different languages?
  - johnday 5y ago
    The point is that "mayors of San Fransisco" does not have a single answer, and therefore any answer WikiData provides will be glossing over a mountain of nuance and important distinctions in terminology. The same is true of a million million different individual and aggregated data points all across WikiData.
    - adwn 5y ago
      In the context of Wikipedia articles about the Western US city commonly called "San Francisco", the concept of "mayor" is sufficiently well defined that there is a single answer to it. The concerns voiced here sound a little like "What if in a hundred years, GPT-255 has subjugated all of humanity into a hive-mind and the terms 'San Francisco' and 'mayor' are meaningless?" Yes, well. One thing at a time.
      - johnday 5y ago
        I was using the singular example from the parent comment. If it would convince you more, I will provide others - though I'm sure you could think of some yourself, if the mood took you.
Angostura 5y ago
> For example, what is the expected result of the query "how many colors are there in a rainbow? Wouldn't it be... For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue) But expanded somewhat?
darkerside 5y ago
Here's the crazy thing. Language is shaped by culture, yes. But culture of also shaped by language. WikiFunctions would essentially become a new language framework that could potentially impact culture. The things that WF values (being the only X to do Y), and that are readily expressible in that framework, could _potentially_ become the markers of success in modern culture. A cultural self-fulfilling prophecy.
achow 5y ago
I always thought it was 7 colours universally: VIBGYOR
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Do even English speakers know what "indigo" is?
  - occamrazor 5y ago
    The blue colour of blue jeans, which were originally made with indigo dye.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      There's a hint in there that maybe "indigo" is not really a word people use.
  - achow 5y ago
    Indigo is one of the oldest fabric dye. Wars were fought and nations survived on Indigo trade (ref: East India company)
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      So, no?
inawarminister 5y ago
Interesting In Indonesia (and related culture) we also have 7 Mejikuhibiniu Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple. We don't use indigo often in daily life though.
markdown 5y ago
> For the majority of European languages, the answer will be 6, but in Russian language/culture, the answer will be 7 (there's additionally light-blue). In my country, a former British colony, we learn the acronym ROYGBIV in school. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. 7 colours.
uniqueid 5y ago
I haven't looked at the spec, but presumably the model will output only a subset of any language. It seems pretty do-able providing there's the ability to add the (hopefully) rare sentence per-target-language manually. I actually hope Wikipedia, or someone, knocks it out of the park because it could form the basis of a new kind of web.
spiraling_shape 5y ago
From fifth-to-last paragraph of the article: Even if you accept the premise that an internet encyclopedia should be written from a neutral point of view, it is clear that some knowledge is contested within cultures, such as whether the population of Israel should include occupied and contested territories, or whether Catalonia is better described as a Spanish autonomous community or its own country. If more language editions relied on Abstract Wikipedia as the central source of truth, then this dominant point of view could replace alternative perspectives. But Vrandečić countered that each volunteer community could decide for itself whether Abstract Wikipedia should be used as a baseline. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, will not mandate that different language versions be forced to use the machine-readable, abstract version. That means that, for example, Hebrew Wikipedia and Arabic Wikipedia could each continue to present very different articles for the topic of Jerusalem.
lakis 5y ago
I think a better query is "how many types of snow exist"? On my experience, one, snow, period. Somebody living in north Canada, probably have more variations of the snow. In Eskimo language, there are ~300 words to express the variations of snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow Does this imply that every query about snow should be expressed in all these 300 variations of snow. Do I even know or care as a non-Eskimo speaker of all these variations?
- lakis 5y ago
  We can always use the types of snow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_snow I count 6 types of snow 3 intensity of snowfall (which can also mean snow) 8 snow crystal classifications 4 types of snowpack material properties 7 wind induced snow structures 5 sun/temperature induced snow structure 9 ski resort classifications 7 informal classifications

qsort 5y ago

in re English wiki vs. other wikis: IME most people default to en.wiki unless they are looking for something very specific that the English language version doesn't cover. It's not surprising en.wiki gets the most attention, it's the one people actually use. For instance, I remember university professors routinely saying to never look up stuff on, in my case, it.wiki. That's good advice, as far as I'm concerned. > He imagines a future in which the human editors of Abstract Wikipedia are not only writing functions using computer code, but are also able to communicate with one another via that code. vaste programme > “All of those examples [of universal languages] are failures, all of them didn’t work out,” Vrandečic told me. “So why do we think we have a chance? [Because] we’re creating a framework where we have thousands of people working on this problem, not just a single person or some very small group [...]” He's completely wrong about the reason. Code as a language doesn't work out because the apparent correspondence between the two is in fact only superficial. Natural language is not formal, it doesn't attempt to be formal, and it doesn't need to be formal. I don't think adding more people is going to solve any of that.

kgeist 5y ago
>IME most people default to en.wiki unless they are looking for something very specific that the English language version doesn't cover. It's not surprising en.wiki gets the most attention, it's the one people actually use. That's a pretty wrong generalization. It depends on the country, whether they speak English well enough and if their national wikipedia is big enough (Scandinavian countries, maybe?). In Russia, for example, almost no one reads the English version. I assume it's the case in France as well. Also I've seen friends of mine from Germany exchange mostly German wiki links between themselves.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
People in France or Japan or most other countries don’t default to the English language version of Wikipedia.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I can confirm for France, the French edition of Wikipedia is usually good, especially for science-related topics and local things.

ceilingcorner 5y ago

If more language editions relied on Abstract Wikipedia as the central source of truth, then this dominant point of view could replace alternative perspectives. But Vrandečić countered that each volunteer community could decide for itself whether Abstract Wikipedia should be used as a baseline. That sounds about as likely as “every country can decide whether to be affected by English-language media.” This drive toward constant universalization is scary and it’s only going to make Wikipedia even more of a Western worldview project. We need to be heading in the opposite direction. You can be certain that China or India or whomever else will block Wikipedia rather than let western NGOs continue to define the narratives in their respective countries.

thinkingemote 5y ago
It also leaves open the later mandate of removing opt-in. One can easily imagine a large international crisis where truth is relative depending on where you are but where writing about something might be deemed as dangerous and harmful misinformation which has to be erased. Imagine Wikipedia during WW2 for example for conflict. It's an inverse tower of babel situation - a kind of hubris where the aim of reducing differences leads to a greater evil. The hubris is that clever westerners think its possible to fit everyone into the same way of mind and if that happens then they will touch heaven.
Isinlor 5y ago
China already blocks Wikipedia since 2015 and has it's own communist world view project. I don't see how Wikipedia can accommodate Chinese world view were facts are denied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia#Blocking_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia#Blocking_of_... Wikipedia should absolutely remain Western world view project.

traceroute66 5y ago

"Trying to Transcend the Limits of Human Language" or is it rather "Using algorithms to transform Wikipedia into a politically correct entity based on unknown deciders of what is correct" ? The article already alludes to many cases where this simply won't work due to the realities of needing to take local context into account. Otherwise you'll only end up annoying (very) large groups of people, both amongst your contributors and externally, for no reason other than your desire to be politically correct.

smeej 5y ago

I'm confused as to how Cebuano Wikipedia ever got Diane Feinstein listed as San Francisco mayor in the first place if her tenure ended in 1988. Wasn't 1988 well before the creation of Cebuano Wikipedia? This data would have been significantly out of date even at the time it was added.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
Sounds like it imported an outdated database of global geography / politics.

Zababa 5y ago

More influence from the USA? That's really what we needed from Wikipedia. > But Vrandečić countered that each volunteer community could decide for itself whether Abstract Wikipedia should be used as a baseline. So a few people in the "volunteer community" will decide which biais one of the biggest source of information online will follow? > Throughout this year’s Wikimania, a number of volunteers expressed concern that English was becoming the lingua franca of the movement, and that English Wikipedia was receiving more attention than its counterparts. Vrandečic suspects that Abstract Wikipedia could help with this problem, too. How? Code is written in English, its documentation in English, the resources in English. Unless we do pure lambda calculus or something like that. I'm going to be very skeptic here, but this sounds like a power-grabbing move. That is, some people in Wikipedia want to leverage the power they already have even more. I know how strong the idea of "making things right with tech" can be, but sometimes that's not the correct answer, and this is one of those cases.

yorwba 5y ago
> Unless we do pure lambda calculus or something like that. Yes, that's the plan. The Wikilambda project was renamed to Wikifunctions (probably because not many people know what "lambda" means in this context), but they kept the logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikifunctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikifunctions Wikidata already demonstrates that language-agnostic knowledge representation works, it's just that it feels like a giant listing of disjointed facts. The new initiative is about turning that into something that wouldn't feel out of place in a human-written Wikipedia article.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Sure, but most of the mindshare will still navigate around English. Look at the number of languages for the introduction https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction, and then look at the Tours https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tours https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tours. Already here we see a massive reduction in the number of languages. I think that the more specialized the information on Wikifunctions or Wikidata becomes, the fewer language choices there will be. This means it could appeal mostly to bilingual or English native audiences. Programming is already very focused on English. I don't think you can build something for people all over the world if most of the people actually building this thing can all communicate with each other in the same language. That's one of the moments where diversity in teams is very powerful: if your team is only composed of people that can understand and express themselves in English, the people that can't won't be served well by your product. Of course you could encode "In this culture, X is Y and in this culture, X is Z", but at this point why not just keep the encyclopedia like it is right now?

wrnr 5y ago

I've studied Lojban for 2 days in the naive attempt to use it for knowledge base technology but then saw a talk about a poem by Lewis Carol translated to Lojban and dropped that effort because it is human unfriendly. The choice of using function is at least an improvement over triplet based systems like Lojban and RDF, similar how Wolfram Alfa uses glorified s-expressions to have a heterogeneous language for data and computations. That said I really think the final point of the article is the most important, Wikipedia lacks a user friendly way of editing and should really have a WYSIWYG editor to appeal to a wider audience of contributors. From talking to engineers at Wikipedia I understand this has in part to do with wikiscript and all the extensions used result in a language that is context dependent and can't be parsed but must be executed while parsing, sort of like human language. Haha. Anyway I think the situation is lame and they should use their 100 million endowment to build a web editor. If you like contact me I've used prose-mirror.

thinkingemote 5y ago
wikipedia has a WYSIWYG editor enabled on most wikis for several years now. Its often the default editor. I prefer using it. It's called the visual editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor It must have been almost a decade ago since you talked to the engineers, as the alpha version was released in 2012. Time really does fly!
- wrnr 5y ago
  Yes that true it was a long time ago. I checked it now, and it looks decent, but still they should not hide it so well.

ricardo81 5y ago

Interesting read and topic. Seems like the primary driver is utilising all the effort put into the English wiki for other languages and also avoiding potentially redundant extra work. I appreciate the prose that Wikipedia tends to have and hopefully their more structured approach to 'facts' doesn't change that. I've used wiki(pedia|data) datasets, the former for article summaries and latter for knowledge panel facts. Seemed like they've tinkered with something called 'templates' in the past, where things like population wouldn't be in the markup, but reference another page/key where the data actually is (see enwiki for Greece if interested). Was a bit of a pain writing a parser for it especially when these things change so often and as it turns out the population has reverted back to being plaintext in the article. Would call myself a Layman, though my humble suggestion would be that statements could potentially be tagged with wikidataids of the things/events that are mentioned in them. Potentially that could make updates easier and wikidata has translations of entities that are much less subject to literary license. Potentially this could make it easier to translate to other languages. Definitely seems like a large rabbit hole to get into, as you could then go onto have simple language rules like is|was when someone is no longer alive, do-able if the wikidata entity is tagged to the statement. Interesting stuff to think about nonetheless, and noting other comments that some 'facts' are subject to interpretation.

streamofdigits 5y ago

just like biodiversity is wealth and monoculture is risk, wikidiversity is a bonus, not a problem. mapping the human condition into abstract data can never be "neutral". that map is inherently and unavoidably biased. wikipedia is about the only major online site / project that retains a bit of good karma, it would be a pity if its meager resources get squandered chasing open ended projects with ill-defined criteria for success. it might be best (at least in the short term and while the world still sorts out whether and what kind of future we'll have) to leverage the good work in wikidata but only focus on information concerning the natural world - where those biased mappings (while still there) are of a less immediate concern...

zozbot234 5y ago
> it would be a pity if its meager resources get squandered chasing open ended projects with ill-defined criteria for success. How so? The closest equivalent to this project was Wikidata itself, and that has been wildly successful beyond anyone's expectations. Besides Wikipedia itself and other WM projects, every Big Tech software assistant is relying on it.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  wikidata is an incredible powerful concept (the early success / adoption in technically savvy circles hints as much) but developing the fullness of its potential will require a lot of further work on both technical matters, content, usability and transparency / governance / acceptance by world-wide users. abstract wikipedia and related directions are (imho obviously) mission creep, raising the bar to possibly unrealistic heights and thus creating the conditions for criticism of what is (I repeat) one of the few unambiguously good online platforms out there... Afterthought: a premonition of the rise and fall of mozilla (and the string of its failed projects). surveillance capitalists can waste billions at "moonshoots" but non-profits must justify every penny. this is the world we live in, alas

otikik 5y ago

I strongly doubt that "Catalonia the country" vs "Catalonia the autonomous community" is a problem that you can "solve" with an algorithm of any kind. The best you can aim for is finding and displaying the inconsistencies.

toolslive 5y ago

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2521 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2521

shp0ngle 5y ago

As an occasional Wikipedia editor, I loathe WikiData. It's confusing, overly complex and nobody really understands it. It smells of "top down" design, instead of "bottoms up" organic way of wikipedia. Luckily I have to interact with it only occasionally (but it's usually always painful). I hope this won't be a continuation of that.

Zababa 5y ago
I think it will be a continuation of that. That whole idea smell of a "top down" design that nobody really asked for.

softgrow 5y ago

If only Wikidata was easier to use. It is terrific to use across different language articles, but it is for most, including me challenging even to start using.

Ansil849 5y ago

> A simple function might involve calculating how many days have passed between someone’s date of birth and date of death. What kind of days? Sidereal (stellar) days? Solar days?

leobg 5y ago

It’s quite obvious to me that this is the holy Grail of natural language processing: A representation of real world knowledge which can be updated from human language, and which can be automatically translated into human language. That would also mean: If you write a novel, then you can change one fact, and the entire novel will automatically update to reflect that change. So that’s basically what Wikipedia this after.

wikiuser1 5y ago

Reading articles on any XX-XXI centuries event in English and Russian is fascinating. Try Iraq or US Argan war for example. Reading both or more will give you a bigger picture. Same in math and physics.