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The idea of a language-independent wikipedia seems to disregard the fact that language and our definitions are shaped by culture quite considerably. For exampl
by 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 agoOh, the article mentions it, I missed it. It's an entirely optional thing so far.
- mjburgess 5y agoIndeed, 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 agoNot 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 agoI 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 agoOr 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...
- manquer 5y agoPerhaps so, in any other topic thread it wouldn't have mattered as much, we are talking about abstract Wikipedia this kind of challenges will come when knowledge is expected to transcend language. P.S. Also OP said "antony cumio" Andrew Cuomo is similar but quite different . P.P.S. I wouldn't expect context to differentiate say between City of London and London City but New York City and New York state is somewhat well known ? Both the city elections for mayor ( preferential voting) and state governor (sexual harassment) has been in the news lately.
- capableweb 5y agoWhat 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 agoIn 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 agoNot 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 agoEnglish 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 agoLanguages 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 agoObviously. That was the commenters point.
- TchoBeer 5y agoThe 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 agoI 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 agoSame for Spanish (at least in LATAM): celeste and azul.
- darkwater 5y agoOh yeah in Italian there is also Celeste so there are three (although is pretty interchangeable with Azzurro)
- wazoox 5y agoAnd French. Rouge Orangé Jaune Vert Bleu Violet Indigo.
- ertomentis 5y agoSimilar with Polish - blue is "niebieski", light-blue is "błękit" or, more rarely, "lazur"
- another-dave 5y agoWow, 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 agoI 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 agoThat'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 agoGerman has 6, french has 7 though
- ginko 5y agoI've never heard that rainbows are supposed to have a discrete number of colors.
- another-dave 5y agoIt'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 agoIn 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 agoHow could this be any worse than tracking and updating those shifts of definition across thousands of articles in hundreds of different languages?
- johnday 5y agoThe 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 agoIn 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 agoI 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 agoHere'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 agoI always thought it was 7 colours universally: VIBGYOR
- user-the-name 5y agoDo even English speakers know what "indigo" is?
- occamrazor 5y agoThe blue colour of blue jeans, which were originally made with indigo dye.
- user-the-name 5y agoThere's a hint in there that maybe "indigo" is not really a word people use.
- achow 5y agoIndigo is one of the oldest fabric dye. Wars were fought and nations survived on Indigo trade (ref: East India company)
- user-the-name 5y agoSo, no?
- inawarminister 5y agoInteresting 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 agoI 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 agoFrom 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 agoI 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 agoWe 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