Hi, Andy! Welcome! I do like your idea of being clear about basic "facts" and details. I think it will be key in the selection of "statements" that go into an "article", in whatever language is required. I don't think we can say how many levels of information there might be, but we can already see something from how Wikipedia pages are put into categories.
"France is a country in Europe" and "in western Europe" and "in the European Union", just to mention three categories. The first is an important fact of geography, but is the second more helpful? All countries in western Europe are (1) a country and (2) in Europe and (3) to the west. (3) feels more like a detail, but if we tell you France is in Europe, what is the first question you might ask? It might be, "Is it in the European Union?" or "How big is it?" or "Do many people live there?" So I would expect us to give you those facts or details (FAQs) as well.
Facts about facts and statements about claims are a whole other topic, but if a "fact" is disputed, we do need to know how to show this. If you look at Wikidata, you will see that the United Kingdom has been a sovereign state since 1927. This is untrue. But if 1927 is not the answer to the question "How long has the UK been a country (or sovereign state)?", what is? "Since 1707, 1801 or 1922", depending on the details. Luckily for you, France has "always" been a country, despite now being the fifth republic (since 1958).
So, sometimes the Property of an entity is not a simple value or relationship. It might be better to think about it as a relationship to a "disagreement" or debate. Then, a "fact" is an entity's relationship to an absence of "disagreement", a "consensus", as Wikipedia would call it. Part of this consensus is the meaning of an entity's label. For example, English Wikipedia thinks "oxygen" is the chemical element ("O") and "its most stable form" ("O<sub>2</sub>", "dioxygen"). French Wikipedia thinks "oxygène" is just the element. Wikidata has statements (mostly) about the element but the "Identifiers" (external authorities) are for the English Wikipedia concept, not the French one. The point is, it is clear that there might be some confusion! We have a separate item for dioxygen and for ozone and (in theory) for atomic oxygen (and there are others) so we can give you all of the oxygen facts, mostly grouped by form (allotrope and/or state). Think of that as a disambiguation page enriched with detail... It's an interesting use case (or test case), I think.
Best regards, Al.
On Tuesday, 28 July 2020, abstract-wikipedia-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- All work is preliminary (Denny Vrandečić)
- Two different kinds of information? (Andy)
Message: 1 Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2020 12:43:05 -0700 From: Denny Vrandečić dvrandecic@wikimedia.org To: Abstract Wikipedia list abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Abstract-wikipedia] All work is preliminary Message-ID: <CA+bik1dNtpbA3H2_O=8H8iyNrBPMbpQeAaOb04EpEaoLxCWSZQ@mail.gm ail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hello all,
one of the things we have been discussing in the team is that we want to do as much of our work in the open. At the same time, we're a distributed team and starting to form a shared understanding of the task at hand. Due to the COVID situation, we didn't have the opportunity to have a project kick off, where we meet for a few days and make sure that we are fully aligned and use the same words and have the same thinking.
That's both an opportunity, but also a risk, as it might lead to divergence in what we are saying and writing.
We have two possible ways forward - either we vet documents and discussions internally every time, in order to present a more unified view on the project, or we just drop that and we publish our documents and plans in the open immediately, with the understanding that this is merely preliminary, that there might be inconsistencies. We might discuss and disagree with each other publicly in Phabricator tasks and on this mailing list and on the wiki pages - but in the end, this is also an opportunity to together with you build a common understanding and share the process of developing the project vision and implementation.
So, in that light, we still have a small backlog of internal documents that we want to get out, and by the end of this week, most of the state of the work should be in the open, and we will move more and more of our discussions to the public, to eventually have them all in the open.
Here is a document I have been working on for a while, it is the core model of how the evaluation and representation of data, functions, and function calls in Wikilambda may work. Again, there is no agreement on this yet. It differs from the AbstractText prototype implementation, and there is a list of main differences at the end, and it also has not all the answers yet.
Thanks to, particularly Arthur P. Smith for many comments and rewriting of some of the sections, thanks to Lucas Werkmeister for his valuable input (and, even more important, for his work on GraalEneyj), thanks to Cyrus Omar for his advice and pointers, and thanks to Adam Baso, James Forrester, and Nick Wilson for their internal comments.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Function_model
Feedback on this would be extremely valuable, and you can see there are many open questions left.
Stay safe, Denny
Hi Al,
just one quick request - can you set up your answers to the mailing list in such a way that it doesn't break the thread? (I am not sure how, maybe someone else can chime in, but right now, your answers start a new thread instead of continuing the previous one).
Louis Lecaillez had a similar issue initially, but managed to resolve it, for which I am thankful.
If not, it is OK, but I thought I'd ask.
Thank you! Denny
On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:23 AM Grounder UK grounderuk@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, Andy! Welcome! I do like your idea of being clear about basic "facts" and details. I think it will be key in the selection of "statements" that go into an "article", in whatever language is required. I don't think we can say how many levels of information there might be, but we can already see something from how Wikipedia pages are put into categories.
"France is a country in Europe" and "in western Europe" and "in the European Union", just to mention three categories. The first is an important fact of geography, but is the second more helpful? All countries in western Europe are (1) a country and (2) in Europe and (3) to the west. (3) feels more like a detail, but if we tell you France is in Europe, what is the first question you might ask? It might be, "Is it in the European Union?" or "How big is it?" or "Do many people live there?" So I would expect us to give you those facts or details (FAQs) as well.
Facts about facts and statements about claims are a whole other topic, but if a "fact" is disputed, we do need to know how to show this. If you look at Wikidata, you will see that the United Kingdom has been a sovereign state since 1927. This is untrue. But if 1927 is not the answer to the question "How long has the UK been a country (or sovereign state)?", what is? "Since 1707, 1801 or 1922", depending on the details. Luckily for you, France has "always" been a country, despite now being the fifth republic (since 1958).
So, sometimes the Property of an entity is not a simple value or relationship. It might be better to think about it as a relationship to a "disagreement" or debate. Then, a "fact" is an entity's relationship to an absence of "disagreement", a "consensus", as Wikipedia would call it. Part of this consensus is the meaning of an entity's label. For example, English Wikipedia thinks "oxygen" is the chemical element ("O") and "its most stable form" ("O<sub>2</sub>", "dioxygen"). French Wikipedia thinks "oxygène" is just the element. Wikidata has statements (mostly) about the element but the "Identifiers" (external authorities) are for the English Wikipedia concept, not the French one. The point is, it is clear that there might be some confusion! We have a separate item for dioxygen and for ozone and (in theory) for atomic oxygen (and there are others) so we can give you all of the oxygen facts, mostly grouped by form (allotrope and/or state). Think of that as a disambiguation page enriched with detail... It's an interesting use case (or test case), I think.
Best regards, Al.
On Tuesday, 28 July 2020, abstract-wikipedia-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Send Abstract-Wikipedia mailing list submissions to abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org
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When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Abstract-Wikipedia digest..."
Today's Topics:
- All work is preliminary (Denny Vrandečić)
- Two different kinds of information? (Andy)
Message: 1 Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2020 12:43:05 -0700 From: Denny Vrandečić dvrandecic@wikimedia.org To: Abstract Wikipedia list abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Abstract-wikipedia] All work is preliminary Message-ID: <CA+bik1dNtpbA3H2_O= 8H8iyNrBPMbpQeAaOb04EpEaoLxCWSZQ@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hello all,
one of the things we have been discussing in the team is that we want to do as much of our work in the open. At the same time, we're a distributed team and starting to form a shared understanding of the task at hand. Due to the COVID situation, we didn't have the opportunity to have a project kick off, where we meet for a few days and make sure that we are fully aligned and use the same words and have the same thinking.
That's both an opportunity, but also a risk, as it might lead to divergence in what we are saying and writing.
We have two possible ways forward - either we vet documents and discussions internally every time, in order to present a more unified view on the project, or we just drop that and we publish our documents and plans in the open immediately, with the understanding that this is merely preliminary, that there might be inconsistencies. We might discuss and disagree with each other publicly in Phabricator tasks and on this mailing list and on the wiki pages - but in the end, this is also an opportunity to together with you build a common understanding and share the process of developing the project vision and implementation.
So, in that light, we still have a small backlog of internal documents that we want to get out, and by the end of this week, most of the state of the work should be in the open, and we will move more and more of our discussions to the public, to eventually have them all in the open.
Here is a document I have been working on for a while, it is the core model of how the evaluation and representation of data, functions, and function calls in Wikilambda may work. Again, there is no agreement on this yet. It differs from the AbstractText prototype implementation, and there is a list of main differences at the end, and it also has not all the answers yet.
Thanks to, particularly Arthur P. Smith for many comments and rewriting of some of the sections, thanks to Lucas Werkmeister for his valuable input (and, even more important, for his work on GraalEneyj), thanks to Cyrus Omar for his advice and pointers, and thanks to Adam Baso, James Forrester, and Nick Wilson for their internal comments.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Function_model
Feedback on this would be extremely valuable, and you can see there are many open questions left.
Stay safe, Denny
abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org