November 2025 - Abstract-Wikipedia

Newsletter #228: Vote on the new wiki name!; Finishing each other’s sentences
by Denny Vrandečić 27 Nov '25

27 Nov '25

The on-wiki version of this newsletter (potentially with better formatting than your email client) is here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-11-27 -- Vote for the new wiki name! It is the last week of the voting for naming the new wiki that will hold the language-independent content <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abstract%20Wikipedia%2…> for Wikipedias and the other projects! There are five options available to vote for: - Abstract Wikipedia - Multilingual Wikipedia - Wikiabstracts - Wikigenerator - Proto-Wiki It’s a close vote! *Join us and vote for naming a new project <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abstract%20Wikipedia%2…>!* The vote is open until Monday, 1 December 2025 18:45 UTC <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1764614700>. Finishing each other’s sentences: *“A lipoma is a benign tumor.”* During the last few days I tried to create a specific sentence: *“A lipoma is a benign tumor.”* All the pieces for that should already be in place, so let’s see how far I get. I broke it down into three subgoals before the stated one: *“a black tumor”*, *“a benign tumor”*, *“A lipoma is a tumor.”* *“a black tumor”* I selected *“black”* because that would be an adjective that has a high chance of being available in many languages. The goal is to use the function Z22664 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z22664> to create that noun phrase. Here’s how far that worked out, for all the languages supported in Z21733 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z21733>: *Language* *noun* *adjective* *phrase* QID Q133212 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q133212> Q23445 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q23445> — English tumour <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* black <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* a black tumour <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22664?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> French tumeur <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* noir <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* une tumeur noire <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22664?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> Italian tumore <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* nero <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* un tumore nero <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22664?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> Spanish — negro <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* — Persian — — — German Tumor <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* schwarz <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* ein schwarzer Tumor <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z20612?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> * Russian — агат <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* — Ukrainian — — — Fields with a * indicate fields that have changed after I started this work, due to edits to the data or functions. Here, a number of questions that I asked myself during the process: - Why did German phrase-building fail? - It was because schwarz <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L181224> didn’t have a masculine form. That’s probably good! German adjectives seem well described by just having three base forms (the normal, comparative, and superlative), and the rest seems to be done with functions. But in order to support that we would need those functions to actually exist. - Before I realized that, I added a masculine form (F4) and made this particular example work, but I am not sure this was the right approach. - Why does the Russian request for the adjective return a noun? - Can we easily add the missing fields in the noun and adjective column? - Can we add more languages to the table, particularly our focus languages, Dagbania, Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, and Malayalam? Does this function even make sense in those languages? - Should the English be “tumor” or “tumour”? Can we use the differentiation between American English and British English here effectively? *“a benign tumor”* For English, the Lexeme benign <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L30116> already existed, and for Italian, benigno <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L1199424>, and for German, gutartig <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L820674>. But they were not connected to Wikidata items yet. The first step here was to find the right item and property to connect the lexeme with. First I checked what properties are usually used to connect adjective senses <https://w.wiki/GCxS>, and found that a item for this sense <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P5137> to Benignity <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11680195> would be a good way to connect. I checked with the lexicographic community, and added that link. The table summarizes the situation at time of writing: *Language* *noun* *adjective* *phrase* QID Q133212 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q133212> Q11680195 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11680195> — English tumour <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* benign <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* * a benign tumour <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22664?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> * French tumeur <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* — — Italian tumore <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* benigno <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* * un tumore benigno <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22664?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> Spanish — — — Persian — — — German Tumor <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* gutartig <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* * — Russian — — — Ukrainian — — — - fields with a * indicate fields that have changed after starting this work The German noun phrase does not generate for the same reason as it did not in the previous step. Again, morphological functions to create regular German adjective forms are probably the best way forward here. *“Lipoma is a benign tumor.”* Now that we have the previous subphrase, we know we have the second part of the phrase we want to get to. Z29591 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29591> only is available in English so far. *Language* *noun* *adjective* *class* *sentence* QID Q689985 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q689985> Q11680195 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11680195> Q133212 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q133212> English lipoma <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z23468?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> benign <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *adj* * tumour <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z22696?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> *n* lipoma is a benign tumour. <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z29591?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> * - fields with a * indicate fields that have changed after starting this work Here, too, a few questions and ideas came up during the process: - Maybe we can reuse parts from Z26039 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z26039>? That is available in more languages already. - The English sentence should reuse Z10771 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z10771>, to correct the capitalization. - Only after checking other articles, I noticed that it should be *“A lipoma is a benign tumor.”* and not *“Lipoma is a benign tumor.”*, so closer to Z26095 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z26095>. That’s what I get for not being a native speaker! *“A lipoma is a tumor.”* Now that I noticed that we need an indefinite article in the beginning, I took a look at the existing function Z26095 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z26095> to see if it can create the sentence *“A lipoma is a tumor.”* Although there are functions for English, Italian, Dagbani, German, French, and Low German, none of them resulted in a sentence. The English function <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z23410> though had two implementations — which is normally totally fine. But in this case, the two implementations did different things: one of them was based on Lexemes <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z23414>, the other on Item labels <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z23752>. This leads to different results! The former fails, whereas the latter actually works and results in the English sentence “A lipoma is a tumor.” Lipoma doesn’t have a lexeme, and maybe that’s OK. So we need ways to deal with a situation where we only have a Wikidata item. And the latter implementation does that. But I think the two implementations should be aligned, and only one of them should remain connected. In fact, we probably should first check if there is a lexeme, and only if not, fall back to the item label (there might even already be a function doing that?). *“A lipoma is a benign tumor.”* So, I created a new function Z29743 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29743> for this kind of sentence, taking three Wikidata item references: for the described class, the adjective, and the superclass. With that we finally were able to generate the target sentence *“A lipoma is a benign tumour.”* <https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z29773?call=%7B%22Z1K1%22%3A%22Z7%22%…> Reflections from the process One thing that I noticed while working on this is that the current caching mechanisms can really slow down this kind of work, as earlier versions of changed data or functions can sometimes take a long time to clear from the cache. That’s something that we will need to address in order to make contributors more effective. A few additional observations emerged along the way: - *Adjectives lists rather than single items:* One thing that was rightfully mentioned in the discussion on Telegram <https://t.me/Wikifunctions> is that the adjectives maybe should be a list instead of a single item, so that we can say things such as *“A colt is a young, male horse.”* - *Consolidating determiner logic:* There is something wrong about the many different determiners leading to many different fragments. We need to encapsulate that better, and we should learn from existing frameworks for that. Do we really need different fragment functions for *“Tokyo is a big city.”*, *“The Nile is a long river.”, “Ice is frozen water.”* and *“A foal is a young horse.”*? In fact, Grammatical Framework <https://www.grammaticalframework.org/> seems to encapsulate this and automatically chooses the determiners right for around fifty different languages. We should probably learn from that! Opportunities for community contributions I pushed this through for a single language, and it would be great to see if we can make this work for more languages, especially in our focus languages, to demonstrate the capabilities of this approach. Please reach out to me on wiki or on Telegram if you want to try and need help, or if you added relevant data to Wikidata or functions to Wikifunctions, so I can keep an eye on it, and we can see for how many languages this will become available. I would love for all of us to come back in a week or two and see that we made progress on this specific natural language generation task. Shareable function calls In the previous section you already saw the advantage of using shareable function calls <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Introduction#Share_a_Funct…>, an amazing, brand-new feature! You can now generate a link to any function call, with its inputs included, and share it with others. When someone opens the link, the call is automatically reconstructed, making it easy to reproduce inputs, results, verify behavior, and collaborate on debugging or improvements. Now you can link to a function call directly, including all values for the function call, so that you can see the result immediately. These links can be shared everywhere. The feature is described in our documentation <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Introduction#Share_a_Funct…> . Recent Changes in the software This week, we shipped a few improvements to make Wikifunctions more reliable, readable, and developer-friendly. First, we resolved an issue in the Publish dialog where users received no feedback when attempting to publish after their session token had silently expired (T407207 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T407207>). Previously, clicking Publish would simply darken the button with no indication of what went wrong. The dialog now properly detects expired session tokens and surfaces a clear logged-out error message instead of a silent failure. This ensures that all valid compositions can be saved or, if not, users know exactly why. A new compact read-mode component for Wikidata Statements is also now available (T406612 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T406612>). This replaces the old, verbose ZObject rendering with a cleaner, more interpretable UI. Statements now appear as a one-line, structured display showing subject, predicate, and value, with an expandable section for qualifiers, references, and rank. The result is a far more scannable, modernized view that preserves all detail without the previous visual overload. We also fixed an issue with `Wikifunctions.Debug()` (T407084 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T407084>), which lets developers attach logs to the response of a function call. These logs were previously not rendered correctly in the metadata dialog. With this update, all logs generated during execution now appear as a list under “Execution debug logs” in the Error section of the metadata dialog, making it much easier to inspect what happened during a function run. A very special Volunteers’ Corner on December 1 Next Monday, 1 December 2025 at 18:30 UTC <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1764613800>, we will have the last Volunteers’ Corner of the year. We plan to have our usual agenda, but with one special twist: we intentionally set the closing date for the above-mentioned vote for the name of the new wiki to end at 18:45 UTC. So we can close the vote live during the call, and immediately calculate the top result (modulo checking potential vote eligibility). Our usual agenda will frame the call: there will be time to ask questions and discuss all matters arising, and, if we have time, write a function together. We will skip the January Volunteers’ Corner due to the holidays in January (Wikipedia 25 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%2025>!) and invite you again in February! Fresh Functions weekly: 38 new Functions This week we had 38 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - simple table from function, string, table language (Z29557) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29557> - regular English present tense from lemma (Z29559) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29559> - HTML fragment contains second fragment (Z29572) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29572> - HTML fragment contains fragment, case insensitive (Z29576) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29576> - add caption to table without one (Z29580) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29580> - inject HTML fragment inside 1st bracket of another (Z29582) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29582> - describing entity with adjective / class (Z29591) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29591> - describing entity with adjective / class English (Z29594) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29594> - display function label (Z29600) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29600> - lexeme is a color term (Z29604) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29604> - instances from Wikidata lexeme (Z29607) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29607> - lexeme is a quantity (Z29612) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29612> - item (QID) is subclass of these items [QIDs] (Z29620) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29620> - item (QID) is instance of these items [QIDs] (Z29623) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29623> - English sentence describing the class of a class (Z29629) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29629> - terminate sentence with full stop (Z29639) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29639> - Wikidata reference from Wikifunctions language obj (Z29649) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29649> - does language use NAdj order? (Z29654) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29654> - fallback for indefinite noun phrase with adjective (Z29660) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29660> - is Kleenean not False? (Z29661) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29661> - Standard Deviation of List (Z29684) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29684> - partition Wikidata statements by rank (Z29685) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29685> - select best Wikidata statements (Z29688) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29688> - get statements for Wikidata property from item (Z29691) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29691> - get best statements for Wikidata prop from item (Z29694) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29694> - ArticlePlaceholder render WD statement main snak (Z29717) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29717> - select per Wikidata claim subtype (Z29718) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29718> - non-external-ID properties of Wikidata item (Z29724) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29724> - sort according to other list (Z29725) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29725> - Wikidata property reference from PID string (Z29727) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29727> - sort Wikidata property refs in typical order (Z29728) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29728> - get properties' IDs from Wikidata item reference (Z30025) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z30025> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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artificial intelligence
by Reza Amiri 21 Nov '25

21 Nov '25

Ethical challenge in intelligence

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Newsletter #227: Second round of voting for naming the wiki with language-independent content; Sharing function calls
by Denny Vrandečić 20 Nov '25

20 Nov '25

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-11-20 ---- Second round of voting for naming the wiki with language-independent content We are kicking off the second round of voting for the wiki that will hold the language-independent content <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abstract%20Wikipedia%2…> for Wikipedia and the other projects. Out of the more than hundred proposals in the first round, five remain for you to vote. - Abstract Wikipedia - Multilingual Wikipedia - Wikiabstracts - Wikigenerator - Proto-Wiki Please vote here! <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abstract%20Wikipedia%2…> Votes are indicating your preferred ranking. The result of the vote is determined by using the instant run-off voting <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff%20voting> process: if the first choice of all voters represents an absolute majority, that is the winner. If not, the option with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated, and the counting starts again. Unfortunately, my favorite proposal (*Wikicore*) had to be removed due to an already existing registered and actively used trademark. We added a summary of the discussion, as well as comments from the Wikimedia Foundation’s branding team to the [:meta:Abstract Wikipedia/Abstract Wikipedia naming contest/Names|voting page]]. The legal team comments are expected to be added within the next few days. Voting will go on until 1 December 2025 18:45 UTC <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1764614700>. Voting results will be immediately visible, but the actual outcome of the process will only be announced after a second round of legal review. Recent Changes in the software: Sharing function calls This week’s most notable user-facing update: you can now share your function calls with one click! (T406620 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T406620>). After running a function, you’ll see a “Copy result link” button below the result panel. The link includes the exact inputs, so anyone who opens the link will see the same function call and results (unless the implementation has changed since the link was generated). This makes it easier to share examples, ask for help, or document reproducible function calls. Try it: run any function, then look for the "Copy result link" button below the result panel. We also fixed a scope error that affected compositions using error builtin functions (Z850 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z850>, Z851 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z851>, Z852 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z852> and Z853 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z853>). This resolves the community-raised issue (T406425 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T406425>), where Try–Catch returned an incorrect Z525/Invalid key error <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z525> when wrapping functions that used argument references. The fix also enables our community to safely use Z851/Throw builtin <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z851> as requested in Wikifunctions:Request_for_cleanup <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Request_for_cleanup>. As part of Wikimedia-wide language support, we have also added two new languages: Z1983/sgh (T409846 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T409846>) and Z1984/jv-java (T409393 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T409393>). Recording of Mahir Morshed’s presentation comparing Ninai/Udiron with Uniform Meaning Representation <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/File:Abstract_Wikipedia_NLG_SIG_Meeting_…> The recording of this week’s Natural Language Generation Special Interest Group <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:NLG_SIG> Meeting is available on Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abstract%20Wikipedia%20NLG%20SIG%20…> . Mahir <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Mahir256> presented on exploring design choices from the Uniform Meaning Representation <https://umr4nlp.github.io/web/> research compared to Ninai <https://gitlab.com/mahir256/ninai>/Udiron <https://gitlab.com/mahir256/udiron>. Congratulations to Sentinel! Congratulations to this year’s MacArthur Foundation 100&Change winner <https://www.100andchange.org/>, the Sentinel <https://www.macfound.org/press/semifinalist-profile/sentinel> project! Sentinel will change how communities worldwide approach early detection and containment of infectious disease outbreaks. Earlier this year, Wikimedia Foundation with Abstract Wikipedia was announced as one of the five finalists <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-04-30>. We congratulate our fellow finalist for receiving the grant! It’s been an honor to stand alongside so many organizations working to make the world more equitable. We’re proud to have shared how Abstract Wikipedia can accelerate knowledge creation and sharing globally. We appreciate the MacArthur Foundation's support of free, trustworthy knowledge. We thank Google.org, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wikimedia Endowment for their support. Fresh Functions weekly: 31 new Functions This week we had 31 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - index (1...N) of (first) list maximum (Z29426) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29426> - maximum value on list (natural numbers) (Z29429) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29429> - count occurrences of list 1 elements in list 2 (Z29438) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29438> - Z_SLOPE (Z29443) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29443> - second element (performance) (Z29446) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29446> - best instance of (P31) qid of first enum instance (Z29453) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29453> - create wikitable from function and features (Z29462) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29462> - Wikidata item reference as enumeration instance (Z29466) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29466> - enumeration instance list from Wikidata references (Z29476) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29476> - type for a function's third argument (Z29484) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29484> - simple table from function, LID, table language (Z29488) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29488> - enumeration reference values from type (Z29493) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29493> - replace Nth character with substitution (Z29506) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29506> - pair first object and quoted object (Z29518) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29518> - key–value pairs by keys (Z29535) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29535> - persistent object value by key (Z29539) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29539> - complete Persistent object (Z29542) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29542> - Unlabelled (Z29548) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29548> - id of Persistent object (Z29554) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29554> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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Newsletter #226: Getting ready for second round of voting for naming the wiki with abstract content; Rewriting the backend: Why Rust?
by Denny Vrandečić 13 Nov '25

13 Nov '25

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-11-13 -- Getting ready for second round of voting for naming the wiki with abstract content Next week, we will kick off the second and final round of voting for the name of the wiki with abstract content. It will be a new wiki, but pretty much a background project for Wikipedia readers. The six proposals we are expecting to go into the second round are Abstract Wikipedia, Wikicore, Multilingual Wikipedia, Wikiabstracts, Wikigenerator, and Proto-Wiki. Starting next week, you will have the opportunity to vote for these proposals by ranking them, and then we will aggregate the votes and find out the preference of the community. Currently, discussions about the proposals are ongoing <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abstract%20Wikipedia%2…>, with the goal to summarize these discussions <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abstract%20Wikipedia%2…> in a single table that will offer guidance to the voters. Please feel free to participate in the discussion and also in the summarization effort. Furthermore we have asked the branding and legal departments of the Wikimedia Foundation to offer advice on the proposals, and are expecting to add these to the table too before the voting starts. Again, thanks to everyone who participated in the process so far, and looking forward to finding a great name for the new project! Rewriting the backend: Why Rust? The Abstract Wikipedia team uses WebAssembly (WASM) for the sandboxing of user-submitted code. This has caused some tension with our services, which are written in Node.js. There are no WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) integrations for Node.js that offer the features necessary to run WASM-based interpreters for Python and JavaScript, nor do the existing integrations allow for control over the WASM sandboxing. The team has therefore been running WASI runtimes in subprocesses, via a command line interface (CLI). This has resulted in complex and brittle logic surrounding the management of nested subprocesses. It's very easy to end up in a situation where a process's parent dies, and the process is then adopted by PID 1. A mythological and terminological note: on Unix systems, processes can have children and parents. A child process whose parent dies becomes an "orphan process," and this orphan can then be adopted by another process. However, when the orphan is adopted by PID 1 and becomes unkillable, it is referred to as a "zombie process." This is a nonstandard etiology for zombies, to say the least. In any case, while there are ways to mitigate the zombie process problem, they are hard to integrate into the Wikifunctions service infrastructure. Better still would be to prevent zombie processes from arising at all, which means curbing our reliance on subprocesses. For this reason, the AW team has decided to re-implement the function evaluator in Rust. Rust offers many feature-rich libraries to interact with WASI, including full WASI runtimes that run inside of Rust itself. In this way, we can avoid relying on subprocesses and instead use threads (or, technically, asynchronous tasks) in Rust. Threads/tasks are much easier to manage. Crucially, our Rust code can ensure that tasks safely shut down after a period of time and that all resources used by the task are deallocated upon exit. Looking to the future, Rust has other benefits for the Wikifunctions backend. Rust's WASI libraries offer fine control, and can even open up possibilities for new features for native code execution. The team is also considering whether to subject the function orchestrator to the same treatment. A function orchestrator based on Rust would use significantly less memory and CPU, and also provide stronger guarantees about the behavior of the Wikifunctions composition language. Recent Changes in the software There's only one user-facing change this week. We have introduced a new pre-defined error, Z576, that will be emitted when the back-end evaluator service is unable to load (T408824 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T408824>); this specific error will now return much more swiftly rather than waiting for the timeout (T408826 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T408826>). These changes are part of work following-up on the Python outage (T406848 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T406848>). We deployed local caching, in the orchestrator, of results from search requests to Wikidata (T408013 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T408013>). This will speed up calls to some functions that build on Find lexemes for a Wikidata item <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6830> and/or Find lexemes for a Wikidata lexeme sense <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z6831>. German noun declension table <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28602> is an example of such a function. Upcoming NLG/SIG meeting on November 18: exploring design choices from the Uniform Meaning Representation compared to Ninai/Udiron The next meeting of the NLG SIG <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:NLG_SIG> is scheduled for Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at 16:00-17:00 UTC <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1763481600> on Google Meet <https://meet.google.com/xzn-kqer-mah>. The meeting will be recorded. Mahir256 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Mahir256> is presenting on exploring design choices from the Uniform Meaning Representation <https://umr4nlp.github.io/web/> compared to Ninai/Udiron. Asking for help on Wikifunctions: replacing Z28154 We are replacing Z28154 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28154> with the built-in Z851 <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z851>. A list of implementations that would benefit from being updated is here <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Request_for_cleanup#Duplic…>, so we can get rid of the duplicated function. We like to ask for help with this task. Recording of WikidataCon presentations There were two Abstract Wikipedia related talks at WikidataCon <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Event:WikidataCon%202025> this year. The talks can be watched in the YouTube streams: *Mad Libs with Wikidata Lexemes and Abstract Content* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3i9VITsntg&t=11418s> by Mahir <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Mahir256> and *Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia: The Now and the Future* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beUU1JaZSC8&t=9135s> by Geno <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Geno_(WMF)>. Enjoy the recordings! Fresh Functions weekly: 33 new Functions This week we had 33 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - is SignWriting? (Z29248) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29248> - Unlabelled (Z29256) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29256> - quoted reference (Z29267) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29267> - punctuation mark in SignWriting (Z29270) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29270> - Unlabelled (Z29283) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29283> - table from function of row and column elements (Z29286) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29286> - flatten a list completely (Z29290) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29290> - object equivalence (Z29294) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29294> - list to singleton-list (Z29301) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29301> - outer product, u⊗v (rational vectors) (Z29308) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29308> - form for table header (Z29315) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29315> - form for table header, default (Z29316) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29316> - table from function of set arg and list of row,col (Z29324) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29324> - conjugate Italian adjective (feature list) (Z29334) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29334> - Wikidata item reference from object (Z29335) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29335> - QID is valid value of Enum Type (Z29341) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29341> - Italian positive adjective conjugation table (Z29346) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29346> - Function identity (Z29350) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29350> - Unlabelled (Z29356) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29356> - Unlabelled (Z29356) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29356> - apply three-argument function (Z29365) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29365> - table from function of arg, row [arg], col [arg] (Z29368) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29368> - apply3 to a common 1st and 2nd arg and list of 3rd (Z29370) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29370> - Unlabelled (Z29384) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29384> - apply the needed arguments (Z29390) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29390> - indexes of required arguments (Z29396) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29396> - filter list through list of indexes (Z29400) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29400> - most common element on list (Z29409) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29409> - count occurrences of element on list (Z29413) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29413> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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อู๋ศักดา
by ศักดา กุลนาแพง 09 Nov '25

09 Nov '25

บังอู๋ครีเอท ศักดา กุลนาแพง (ชื่อเล่น อู๋, "บังอู๋") ซึ่งเป็นนักออกแบบกราฟิกและครีเอทีฟชาวสุพรรณบุรี เขาเป็นผู้ที่มีผลงานด้านการออกแบบกราฟิกและสร้างสรรค์ผลงานครีเอทีฟมากมายในชื่อแบรนด์ "บังอู๋ครีเอท" ข้อมูลส่วนตัว: ชื่อจริง: ศักดา กุลนาแพง ชื่อเล่น: อู๋, บังอู๋ หรือ อู๋แอคชั่น ชื่อที่ชาวต่างชาตืเรียก: sakdakul, Auaction อายุ: 33 ปี (ข้อมูล ณ ปี 2565) วันเกิด: 27 กุมภาพันธ์ พ.ศ. 2532 ภูมิลำเนา: จังหวัดสุพรรณบุรี อาชีพ: นักออกแบบกราฟิก, ครีเอทีฟ, บล็อกเกอร์, ผลงาน มีผลงานออกแบบในชื่อ "บังอู๋ครีเอท" มากมาย มีผลงานบน YouTube เช่น ผลงานที่เกี่ยวข้องกับ "ศึกษานารี" มีผลงานด้านการสร้างสรรค์งานครีเอทีฟผ่านสื่อต่างๆ

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sakdaku
by ศักดา กุลนาแพง 09 Nov '25

09 Nov '25

บังอู๋ครีเอท ศักดา กุลนาแพง (ชื่อเล่น อู๋, "บังอู๋") ซึ่งเป็นนักออกแบบกราฟิกและครีเอทีฟชาวสุพรรณบุรี เขาเป็นผู้ที่มีผลงานด้านการออกแบบกราฟิกและสร้างสรรค์ผลงานครีเอทีฟมากมายในชื่อแบรนด์ "บังอู๋ครีเอท" ข้อมูลส่วนตัว: ชื่อจริง: ศักดา กุลนาแพง ชื่อเล่น: อู๋, บังอู๋ หรือ อู๋แอคชั่น ชื่อที่ชาวต่างชาตืเรียก: sakdakul, Auaction อายุ: 33 ปี (ข้อมูล ณ ปี 2565) วันเกิด: 27 กุมภาพันธ์ พ.ศ. 2532 ภูมิลำเนา: จังหวัดสุพรรณบุรี อาชีพ: นักออกแบบกราฟิก, ครีเอทีฟ, บล็อกเกอร์, ผลงาน มีผลงานออกแบบในชื่อ "บังอู๋ครีเอท" มากมาย มีผลงานบน YouTube เช่น ผลงานที่เกี่ยวข้องกับ "ศึกษานารี" มีผลงานด้านการสร้างสรรค์งานครีเอทีฟผ่านสื่อต่างๆ

1 0

บังอู๋ครีเอท
by ศักดา กุลนาแพง 09 Nov '25

09 Nov '25

บังอู๋ครีเอท ศักดา กุลนาแพง (ชื่อเล่น อู๋, "บังอู๋") ซึ่งเป็นนักออกแบบกราฟิกและครีเอทีฟชาวสุพรรณบุรี เขาเป็นผู้ที่มีผลงานด้านการออกแบบกราฟิกและสร้างสรรค์ผลงานครีเอทีฟมากมายในชื่อแบรนด์ "บังอู๋ครีเอท" ข้อมูลส่วนตัว: ชื่อจริง: ศักดา กุลนาแพง ชื่อเล่น: อู๋, บังอู๋ หรือ อู๋แอคชั่น ชื่อที่ชาวต่างชาตืเรียก: sakdakul, Auaction อายุ: 33 ปี (ข้อมูล ณ ปี 2565) วันเกิด: 27 กุมภาพันธ์ พ.ศ. 2532 ภูมิลำเนา: จังหวัดสุพรรณบุรี อาชีพ: นักออกแบบกราฟิก, ครีเอทีฟ, บล็อกเกอร์, ผลงาน มีผลงานออกแบบในชื่อ "บังอู๋ครีเอท" มากมาย มีผลงานบน YouTube เช่น ผลงานที่เกี่ยวข้องกับ "ศึกษานารี" มีผลงานด้านการสร้างสรรค์งานครีเอทีฟผ่านสื่อต่างๆ

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Newsletter #225: First round of voting for naming the wiki for abstract content closed; Calling for Wiktionary functions; Embedded Wikifunctions on Bengali Wikipedia and seven more Wiktionaries
by Denny Vrandečić 06 Nov '25

06 Nov '25

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2025-11-05 ---- First round of voting for naming the wiki for abstract content closed The first round of voting for naming the wiki for abstract content is over. The process has received 102 proposals, and a total of 525 votes. Thanks to everybody who voted in this round, and to all the community members submitting proposals. Following the process, the top six proposals by votes have now been submitted for an initial cursory legal and brand review, and in nearly two weeks time we will start the second round of the voting process. The top six proposals are: - Abstract Wikipedia (29) - Wikicore (28) - Multilingual Wikipedia (24) - Wikiabstracts (21) - Wikigenerator (17) - Proto-Wiki (16) Until the vote starts, we are setting up a page to collect opinions on the proposals, and discuss them <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abs…>. At the end, besides a link to the complete discussion, we would like to offer a voting guide with a short summary of the discussion <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract%20Wikipedia/Abs…>. We would like to have the discussion together with all of you, and to write the summary together. Now that the first round is over, I want to offer a few proposals that we are very glad have not been made: “1 Wikipedia”, “Common Wikipedia” (note that there is no “s” at the end of Common, the other domain is already taken), and “Wikipedia Foundation”. Thank you all for actively suggesting proposals and for voting in the process! We are excited to start preparing round two of the voting process, which will start on November 17. Embedded Wikifunctions on Bengali Wikipedia and seven more Wiktionaries Wikifunctions is now live on seven more Wiktionaries and the Bengali Wikipedia! These projects now have the ability to call functions directly from Wikifunctions. The seven Wiktionaries are Polish, Russian, Icelandic, Madurese, Santali, Tulu, and Standard Moroccan Amazigh. Wikifunctions in Action on Wiktionaries As Wikifunctions continues rolling out to more Wiktionaries, it’s exciting to see how it can support Wiktionary communities. The first declension table function is available (German noun declension table function <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z28602>) and already embedded in a Wiktionary example (see this example <https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikt:Haus> on the Croatian Wiktionary), showing how Wikidata and functions can work together to automatically display noun forms. *Expanding What’s Possible for Wiktionaries*: Let’s build on this momentum. We’d love your help in building more functions that support Wiktionary editors; for example declension tables for more languages, or verb conjugation tables. Expanding the collection of language functions will make Wikifunctions even more useful, helping Wikifunction editors create consistent entries and support language communities across Wikimedia projects. If you like help, feel free to ask! We are happy to give guidance while building the first few tables. Also, if you have other ideas that might help Wiktionary contributors, share! We want to build up a growing set of functions that are useful across different language editions of Wiktionary. Recent Changes in the software This week we've fixed the {{#wikifunctionlabeldesc:zid|lang}} parser function that renders the name and description of the given object Zid, so that descriptions that contain wikitext don't break the link to the object ( T400345 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400345>). This parser function is now working as expected and editors are welcome to use wikifunctionlabeldesc and wikifunctionlabel. Some community templates such as Z+ may still need updates to fully benefit from the fix. Recording of November Volunteers’ Corner The recording from this week’s Volunteers’ Corner is available on Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abstract%20Wikipedia%20Volunteer%20…>. Thanks to Cory Massaro <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:CMassaro_(WMF)>, during this session we wrote a function to conjugate English verbs in the present tense and return the result as an HTML table. We found some very instructive bugs: at one point, the function's argument declaration was wrong, which caused a small cascade of failures in the backend, leading to a hard-to-read error. After we addressed that issue, the function worked, but it was still flawed. The composition hard-codes the labels to be in English when it should instead read those labels from Wikidata and display them in the requested language. The function also fails to conjugate most verbs correctly. As it stands, the function just adds "s" to the lemma of a verb in the third person singular. This works for some verbs ("work" => "works" ✔️) but not others ("hiss" => "hisss" ❌), let alone irregular verbs ("be" => "bes" ❌). This function evinces the importance of lexical data: even for a simple case like this, it's often impossible to write a function that can fully capture all manifestations of a linguistic phenomenon. Recording of the Mentor Me! Session with Tyap Wikimedians On Friday 31 October, Sannita <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Sannita_(WMF)> held a presentation with the Tyap Wikimedians community, during a session of the Mentor Me! initiative, a recurring event of the Tyap community to get to know more about the Wikimedia universe. A recording of the presentation and of the resulting discussion is available on Youtube <https://www.youtube.com/live/GpuwFANOdbs?si=vGMS9mz1Byw40ohG>. Thanks to the organisers for providing the recording, and Sannita for the presentation! Fresh Functions weekly: 21 new Functions This week we had 21 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing! - Croatian Genitive of a male name (Z29088) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29088> - Reference from ZID string (Z29102) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29102> - Mid Exchange Rate (Z29108) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29108> - quoted reference from ZID string (Z29113) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29113> - rational as formatted decimal (dot separators) (Z29116) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29116> - Persistent object from ZID string (Z29120) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29120> - Rotate a 2D point about origin (Z29125) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29125> - list of quoted references (Z29128) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29128> - formatAPAName for list (Z29130) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29130> - Swedish short description for album (Z29134) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29134> - formatAPAName from Wikidata item ref (Z29137) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29137> - change SignWriting lane (Z29150) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29150> - Unlabelled (Z29153) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29153> - Indonesia short description for album (Z29156) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29156> - same Quote (Z29166) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29166> - English present tense conjugation (Z29186) <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z29186> A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created <https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderb…> is available.

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Abstract-Wikipedia November 2025