Charles,

For an example, we can refer to the Douglas Adams article (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q42). We can see that the statement that Douglas Adams was a science fiction writer is attributed to the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Let us imagine that that statement was not asserted and sourced to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but was instead derived from the combination of facts that he authored works which were science fiction. Douglas Adams authored the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy and those works were science fiction. I am not saying that that is a valid rule; it is merely an example for this discussion: authors of science fictions works are science fiction writers.

In the hypothetical, there would be a statement in the knowledgebase with, instead of a reference, a derivation (statements could, however, have both sources and derivations). Perhaps, one day, readers will be able to click on a derivation’s hyperlink on Wikidata to view an automatically-generated page explaining it.

An automatically-generated natural language article for Q42 might contain a sentence “Douglas Adams was a science fiction writer” which would have a numbered citation, but, in the hypothetical, instead of that citation referring to a referenced material from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, it would refer to an automatically-generated document which explained the origin of the statement from automated reasoning upon component statements, those recursively either asserted and sourced or the result of automated reasoning.

It is interesting to consider the propagation of sources [1] and/or derivations [2] from Wikidata knowledgebase statements to citations for referenced materials or derivations in automatically-generated articles.

I hope that automated reasoning would not be in tension with standard Wikipedia policies on original research and synthesis [3]. Perhaps there would be new policies for reviewing each logical rule desired to be entered into the knowledgebase. In my opinion, a privileged user role (e.g. administrator) would be needed for activating and deactivating proposed logical rules used to produce knowledgebase statements.

Best regards,

Adam

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Sources

[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Reasoning

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

From: Charles Matthews via Abstract-Wikipedia
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2020 6:49 AM
To: General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] Wikidata Statement Provenance, Automated Reasoning, and Natural Language Generation

On 14 July 2020 at 03:11 Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com> wrote:

I

That is, automatically-generated articles could provide reasoning supporting, arguments for, and/or proofs of the contents of natural language sentences in a manner similar to how they can provide referenced sources and materials.

Any thoughts on these topics?

The idea is in tension with standard Wikipedia policies on original research and synthesis. Admittedly, it would be interesting to see some edge cases that were/were not acceptable under those policies. But on the whole, I think work in the sort of symbolic AI tradition suggested would be better received as research built on top of the drive to create articles, rather than integrated with it.

Charles