on wiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2020-10-29
I had a weekly update written, but then, on the last moment, I had to
entirely drop it and write a new one - you’ll probably get the other update
next week!
We originally had planned to start the second round of the naming contest
this week, but a number of issues were found with the proposals. Instead of
removing proposals, though, we decided to explicitly and transparently
write up the issues that were raised, and then let you, the community,
decide on the proposals. We are currently writing up a ‘voters’ guide’ with
the results from our internal review processes, which we plan to publish by
the end of the week, and then start the voting on Monday. We will also push
back the end of the voting period by the same number of days.
This week also sees the Eighth Birthday of Wikidata! Congratulations to the
Wikidata project and the Wikidata community! Without Wikidata, Abstract
Wikipedia would be unthinkable, for many different reasons, including:
Wikidata provides a large catalog of entities of interest, which can be
referred to by stable identifiers. This will be extremely helpful when
creating the content of the Abstract Wikipedia: it will allow us to make
some simple statements, such as “Marie Curie and Pierre Curie were
introduced to each other by Józef Wierusz-Kowalski.” This could be
expressed by a constructor that takes three Q-IDs as the parameters, Q7186
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7186>, Q37463
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q37463>, and Q11730603
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11730603>, as in this case all three
mentioned people are represented by an item in Wikidata. But still,
Wikidata will never be sufficient: not everything we want to talk about
will have a Wikidata item, and Abstract Wikipedia will need a mechanism to
create a reference through description: for example, the mother of Marie
Curie does not have an item in Wikidata. We could either create an item, or
we could refer to her by description in Abstract Wikipedia, i.e. a
constructor with the meaning “the mother of Marie Curie”. But for these
descriptions, having the large catalog of entities that Wikidata provides
will be immensely valuable.
Wikidata also provides a lot of data that can be used directly in Abstract
Wikipedia. We would not need to repeat the date of birth for Marie Curie
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7186#P569> in Abstract Wikipedia, but can
simply query Wikidata for the statement about her date of birth and display
the respective value. This will help with reducing the number of places we
have to maintain data.
Wikidata also contains a large catalogue of references, and there are two
aspects to that. On the one hand, the statement about Marie Curie’s date of
birth has in fact 17 references <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7186#P569>.
We can then select some of those references to be displayed in the rendered
Wikipedia article created from Abstract Wikipedia. This is already
happening today, so if you see the article for Marie Curie in Greek
<https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%AF%CE%B1_%CE%9A%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%85%CF%81%CE%AF>,
you will see 17 references for the date of birth in the infobox.
On the other hand, Wikidata also contains a lot of possible sources as
items: books, scientific articles, websites. The Wikicite conference, which
had its 2020 edition this week
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite/2020_Virtual_conference>, was all
about growing and maintaining the large corpus of referenceable sources
that Wikidata has become. Having the sources described as items will make
it easy to use them in references in Abstract Wikipedia, as it already
makes it simpler to cite them in the Wikipedias.
Wikidata provides the lexicographic database that will be needed for
Abstract Wikipedia. So when we want to talk about the mother of Marie Curie
in, say, Russian, we need to know what the singular nominative form of the
word ‘mother’ is in Russian. And that information will be coming from the
Form <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L57777#F1> stored on the
respective Lexeme in Wikidata.
We are currently planning to better understand and visualize how the
coverage of the lexicographic data in Wikidata is progressing for
encyclopedic content. To undertake this analysis, we have encouraged the
Wikidata team to provide regular JSON dumps of the Lexeme corpora
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T220883>, which is currently processing
and will be available soon. Our thanks to the Wikidata team!
As we see, there are many ways that Wikidata will be used to power Abstract
Wikipedia. In 2021, we also plan to have a discussion amongst the Wikimedia
communities as to whether Wikidata will be the place to actually store and
maintain the content for Abstract Wikipedia, or if it should live in some
other place. There are many pros and cons regarding this decision, and we
are looking forward to the discussion.
In the wiki of functions, Wikidata will provide a large set of interesting
items that can be used as input for functions. Some of the entries in the list
of function examples
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Early_function_examples>
illustrate functions that could use Wikidata items as input: there are
functions such as distance, that calculate the distance between two cities,
or the head of state at birth function, that takes a person and returns the
head of state in the place of birth during the time of birth of that
person, etc. We can have plenty of interesting functions that are answering
questions around Wikidata items. We will use Wikidata as a large repository
of items that can be used in Wikidata functions.
Happy Birthday, "big sibling" project Wikidata! We are looking forward to
joining you as a Wikimedia project as the wiki of functions next year!
New media: We had a talk about Abstract Wikipedia
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAb1HylGemA> at the Wikidata Eighth
Birthday event organized by WikiProject:India and is now available on
Youtube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAb1HylGemA>.