Hello everyone!
I have been a somewhat active user of wikipedia and other wikimedia
websites, and a while ago, I found out about wikifunctions. (As well as
the Mailing lists!!)
At first, I thought it would be a useful programming tool, a repository
of useful functions; however a lot of the functions there are seemingly
trivial.
Examples of such "trivial" functions are:
substring exists
<imap://noahpoulton2%40gmail%2Ecom@imap.gmail.com:993/fetch%3EUID%3E/%5BGmail%5D/Drafts%3E185?part=1.2&filename=Z10070>
To Uppercase <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10018> (as well as
"To lowercase")
and most of the other functions "advertised" (for lack of a better term)
in the "Functions to try out" section.
Then I go to more functions...
<https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Catalogue> and there
are a lot of just string and boolean functions (*).
And then there are a lot of "functions" to do with natural languages.
Which take up a good (70% at a guess) chunk of all of the functions.
Finally at the bottom of this there are some list based functions, which
all seem trivial as well.
So now I want to ask a few questions.
1. In the "What Wikifunctions is not
<https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifunctions_is_not>"
page it says: "Wikifunctions is not an encyclopædia of algorithms".
Why not? Would it not be better to have a concentrated, standardised
place for useful algorithms (like Dijkstra's or sorting algorithms)?
2. Why are pretty much all of the functions trivial or just use
built-in functions/modules?
I get why the languages used (Python and Javascript) are the ones
that are used (easy to read, high-level, popular languages) however
I feel it would be better to use less built-in functions/modules,
for example there is this
<https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10127> function for SHA-256
encryption which literally imports a module, which feels like a bad
thing to do.
3. Why are all the functions named something like `Z10124(Z10124K1)`?
4. Why so many natural language functions? It seems to me to be many
more than all of the actual programming language functions? And, why?
5. In the FAQ, it says: "Wikifunctions is the first step towards
building Abstract Wikipedia." what is meant by this? And, once
again, why?
6. What can I do to help it reach it's full potential? This feels like
it could be used in future to help (newer) programmers, which would
require a lot more (complex) functions.
I want to finish this by saying that I do not think this is bad; just
extremely unfinished! I think it has lots and lots of potential, it just
needs more love from the community, which I hope it gets.
Thanks,
Noah Poulton.
(*) I am aware that in the FAQ
<https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:FAQ> it says "
* At launch:
* We have the ability to have functions that work with Strings and
Booleans.
"
With no explanation other than it being a new project.