Abstract Wikipedia:About
What is Abstract Wikipedia?
[edit]Abstract Wikipedia is a new sister project of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's vision is a world in which everyone has access to the sum of all knowledge. Abstract Wikipedia will help the communities of volunteers contributing to Wikipedia and its related projects to more effectively close knowledge gaps.
Wikipedia has articles about more than 20 million topics in more than 300 languages. But none of these languages alone allow access to the knowledge about these 20 million topics: English has more than seven million articles, Croatian 230,000, and Swahili 100,000. Unless you speak those languages, that knowledge is not easily available to you. And as much machine translation has improved thanks to recent improvements in AI, it is still not at the point where it can produce translations you can trust for many language pairs.
Abstract Wikipedia does that without relying on AI. Each step of the way remains under human control, and is accessible and editable by the volunteers. There are no hallucinations, no inexplicable and unfixable mistakes: If anything is wrong, fixing it is just one step away, and there is full transparency about how the text has been created. It is not just a probabilistic model choosing the capital of Kenya per chance every time. It is human-curated and owned knowledge.
How does Abstract Wikipedia work?
[edit]Articles in Abstract Wikipedia are stored in a notation independent of human languages. The interface of Abstract Wikipedia allows volunteer contributors to create and maintain that language-independent notation. In a second step, this notation is being turned into text in human language. The steps required to make this happen are also created and maintained by a community of volunteers, on Wikifunctions. These steps can use the data on Wikidata, looking up population numbers, dates of birth, or irregular grammatical forms, which have been added to and are maintained on Wikidata by communities of volunteers.
See Help:How to create an article for a step-by-step guide.
Let's follow one example: Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. In Abstract Wikipedia, this might be stored as:
Or, if we use English labels for these identifiers:
This is a call to a function on Wikifunctions. Based on the language, another function is being called. For English, we get the following function call:
And that results in the English text
If we had chosen German, another function would be called:
And that in turn would result in the following German text:
An example with more languages can be found here.
Abstract Wikipedia brings together numerous communities from the Wikimedia Movement and allows them to work together. Basic lexical data and structured data about many topics from Wikidata, functions that capture the necessary computations from Wikifunctions, and images and maps from Wikimedia Commons are all tied together in Abstract Wikipedia and made available for the more than 300 language editions of Wikipedia.
The goal of Abstract Wikipedia is to make more knowledge available to more people in more languages, and to allow volunteer editors to be more effective and work across languages, no matter what language they speak. Improvements to the knowledge will automatically propagate to the Wikipedias, errors will be spotted faster and fixed more effectively, and collaborations across languages become possible. We are tearing down the language barriers which are keeping knowledge apart.
