The on-wiki version of this edition of the newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2026-08-05 ---- Congratulations Jules*: An apple is a fruit

During the opening ceremony, also the Wikimedian of the Year was named: Jules* https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/User:Jules*

*Jimmy Wales:* What is your favourite Wikipedia article? *Jules*:* My favourite is “*pomme*”, which is apple in English, and the reason is that on French Wikipedia it is very important, as folklore. When it was created in [November] 2002 https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pomme&oldid=18085 it had only one sentence, “*Une pomme est un fruit.*”, which means “An apple is a fruit.”, and we often use it to remember that articles can start very small and grow over time as other editors improve it.

Today, after 3,294 edits in almost 24 years, the article https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomme has 79,288 bytes of wikitext, and spans 16 pages when printed.

Curious about this, I went to the Abstract Wikipedia article https://abstract.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q89, and checked the French view:

*(French)* Une pomme est un fruit.

This made me very happy. It felt symbolic. And even better, it also worked to switch it to a number of different languages:

*(Chinese)* 蘋果是一種水果。

*(Czech)* Jablko je ovoce.

*(Japanese)* リンゴは果物である。

*(Malay)* Epal ialah sejenis buah.

*(Swedish)* Ett äpple är en frukt.

None of these languages had a Wikipedia article about apples back then when the French article was written. Many Wikipedia language editions didn't exist yet. In other languages, it also provided text, but here the results were in need of improvement, going from missing capitalization (Serbian) to being ungrammatical (German, Italian) over incomplete sentences (Dagbani) to obvious placeholders (Spanish):

*(Dagbani)* nyɛla binwalli.

*(German)* Ein Apfel ist ein Obst.

*(Italian)* La mela è una frutta.

*(Serbian)* јабука је воће.

*(Spanish)* ❌≪(a) ≫❌manzana❌≪ (is a)≫❌fruta.

In other languages again, for example, English, Bangla, or Ukrainian, it failed for me with a variety of error messages. (Note: The review of the sentences above has been partially supported with a frontier LLM.)

I can understand that some will focus on the mistakes in the text. Here, Wikipedia’s answer has been “so fix it”, and given the way Abstract Wikipedia is built, this is indeed possible. All of it has been designed in a way that allows volunteers to fix the mistakes.

I can see some pointing to the many error messages the system produces. Here, I want to remind folks that we are still in an early beta. Things have already gotten much better, compared to a few weeks ago. We are working hard on making them even better.

I can see that some won’t look beyond the simplicity of the sentence. But here, I am with Jules* and the French Wikipedia: this is a modest beginning. And if you don’t believe that this can grow into something useful, that is OK, you don’t have to volunteer your work on this project. There were plenty of people in 2002, when the French article was written, who dismissed Wikipedia. Understandably. And we welcome community members who believe this can grow into something useful to contribute to the project. The evolution of the original article from 2002 is the result of volunteers jumping in to make it better.

But I am thankful to each and every one of you who looks at this modest beginning and sees a possible future where Abstract Wikipedia can provide knowledge across many languages, where people from all over the world speaking all kinds of different languages can work together, share their voices and their knowledge. We are still quite a journey away from that future. And we only can go this way together.

Congratulations Jules* for your well-deserved reward! And thank you for that reminder!

P.S.: you can also see the sentence render in Elemthala https://elemthala.toolforge.org/ (for more background see Mahir's Wikimania workshop https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2026_%E2%80%93_From_Abstract_Content_to_Concrete_Text_with_Wikidata_Lexemes.webm?start=45:10). For the abstract content, enter ["Q196626", ["Q124316841", ["Q151885", "Q89"], ["Q151885", "Q3314483"]]], select French from the dropdown as the language to render in, click "Validate!" and click "Render". Recent Changes in the software

Most of the team's work last week was on internal matters, as part of our once-every-two-months "Fix It" week. We fixed the abstract article editor to enable the Publish button when you're looking at an old revision, such as when you're reverting or undoing (T431993 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T431993), and we've adjusted the back-end service to not hide errors in some cases (T433276 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T433276). News in Types: Anonymous functions

This week we have created another experimental Type: anonymous functions https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38546, also called lambdas. These are functions composed from functions and values, which are often just needed transiently, and are thus not stored as Wikifunctions functions on their own page. Examples are functions such as “add 259”. For more information, see the English Wikipedia article on anonymous functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous%20function. A small catalogue of functions is available to work with anonymous functions https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Catalogue/Functional_operations#Anonymous_functions, but the set is not complete yet (particularly, composition is still missing).

Anonymous functions have many different use cases, but we have been driven by the proposal to cover words with many forms https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Words_with_many_forms .

We invite you all to create new and discuss the existing Type proposals https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals so we can keep on creating new Types. Thanks to all the community members contributing to the discussion and writing proposals, making it possible to extend Wikifunctions to new domains!

As stated before Wikimania, the one Type we are really looking into right now is the Wikifunctions object reference https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Type_proposals/Wikifunctions_object_reference. We want to keep it both lightweight and useful, and have a few final questions open. Fresh Functions weekly: 121 new Functions

This week we had 121 new Functions. Here is an incomplete list of Functions with Implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what Functions have been created. We crossed 4950 functions with all the energy around Wikimania. Thanks everybody for contributing!

- return type of an anonymous function (Z38556) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38556 - Bubble sort (Z38557) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38557 - id of argument declaration as string (Z38563) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38563 - argument type of declaration for anonymous functio (Z38569) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38569 - meaning of argument (Z38573) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38573 - id of argument reference (Z38577) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38577 - number of arguments (Z38581) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38581 - all arguments bound (Z38586) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38586 - evaluate list or element in s-expression (Z38590) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38590 - evaluate anonymous function (Z38595) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38595 - bind value by identifier (Z38598) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38598 - argument declaration has key (Z38600) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38600 - argument declaration has not key (Z38604) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38604 - argument reference has key (Z38610) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38610 - argument reference has not key (Z38614) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38614 - substitute reference in s-expression (Z38619) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38619 - is argument declaration for anonymous function (Z38620) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38620 - is argument reference for anonymous function (Z38625) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38625 - anonymous function from function with meanings (Z38635) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38635 - argument declaration from number, decl and meaning (Z38638) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38638 - argument reference from number (Z38641) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38641 - argument declaration by position (Z38644) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38644 - identical argument declaration for anon function (Z38645) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38645 - equivalent argument declaration for anon function (Z38652) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38652 - argument declaration by id (Z38657) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38657 - argument declaration has meaning (Z38660) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38660 - argument declaration by meaning (Z38664) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38664 - id of argument declaration by position (Z38668) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38668 - id of argument declaration by meaning (Z38672) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38672 - bind value by position (Z38676) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38676 - is Wikidata reference sourced from Wikimedia proj? (Z38680) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38680 - filter out possibly circular Wikidata references (Z38684) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38684 - reference HTML markers from Wikidata statement (Z38691) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38691 - find lexeme for id, grammatical gender, lang (Z38700) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38700 - lexeme statements contain grammatical gender? (Z38702) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38702 - first repr number str from lexeme with given feat (Z38705) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38705 - lexeme for profession (Z38710) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38710 - join lemmas from lexemes, French (Z38714) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38714 - join occupation list of person, French (Z38720) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38720 - occupation list of person (Z38723) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38723 - gender of person (Z38726) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38726 - lexemes for occupation of person (Z38729) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38729 - lexemes for occupation of person, French (Z38734) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38734 - masculine lexeme form of an occupation, French (Z38735) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38735 - feminine lexeme form of an occupation, French (Z38739) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38739 - birth-(death) date monolingual text for person (Z38745) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38745 - birth-(death) date monolingual text for person, En (Z38748) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38748 - birth-(death) date monolingual for person, default (Z38752) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38752 - person lead sentence with occupations (Z38757) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38757 - Russian genitive singular from item (Z38761) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38761 - Bengali digits to English digits (Z38765) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38765 - lexemes for occupation of person, English (Z38771) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38771 - lemma or fallback QID label (Z38772) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38772 - lemma or fallback QID label, English (Z38775) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38775 - join occupation list of person, English (Z38778) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38778 - join occupation list of person (Z38782) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38782 - lexeme for QID, English (Z38788) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38788 - approximate IPA transcript with Bengali alphabet (Z38795) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38795 - notable works-sentence, English (Z38797) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38797 - notable works-sentence, French (Z38799) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38799 - notable works-sentence (Z38804) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38804 - professions sentence, English (Z38808) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38808 - prefix with indefinite article, English (Z38814) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38814 - better matching lexeme form from lexeme (Z38338) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38338 - if value in list, throw error (Z38345) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38345 - infobox for Wikimedia project (Z38350) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38350 - infobox for chemical (Z38355) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38355 - infobox for planet (Z38364) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38364 - infobox for row, date with column name (Z38367) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38367 - select matching lexeme or default (Z38370) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38370 - infobox for galaxy (Z38373) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38373 - infobox for star (Z38379) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38379 - replace except last (Z38382) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38382 - string before last occurrence (Z38383) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38383 - entity supports paradigms-sentence (Z38388) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38388 - paradigms-sentence in English (Z38389) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38389 - is language written from right to left? (Z38395) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38395 - named after-sentence in English (Z38399) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38399 - depicted by-sentence in English (Z38402) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38402 - main subject-sentence in English (Z38403) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38403 - uses-sentence in English (Z38404) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38404 - has characteristic-sentence in English (Z38406) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38406 - platform-sentence in English (Z38407) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38407 - characteristic of-sentence in English (Z38408) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38408 - depends on software-sentence in English (Z38409) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38409 - symbolizes-sentence in English (Z38410) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38410 - shares border with-sentence in English (Z38411) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38411 - shares border with-sentence (Z38425) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38425 - symbolizes-sentence (Z38428) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38428 - depends on software-sentence (Z38435) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38435 - characteristic of-sentence (Z38440) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38440 - named after-sentence (Z38443) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38443 - platform-sentence (Z38448) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38448 - uses-sentence (Z38453) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38453 - depicted by-sentence (Z38458) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38458 - count of Wikidata item property values (Z38462) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38462 - switch on String (Z38472) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38472 - switch on Type (Z38477) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38477 - switch on Type of Object (Z38482) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38482 - has use-sentence (Z38488) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38488 - named after-sentence in Dutch (Z38495) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38495 - color-sentence in English (Z38499) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38499 - color-sentence (Z38503) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38503 - has characteristic-sentence (Z38508) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38508 - main subject-sentence (Z38515) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38515 - auto-classifying sentence – entity subclass (Z38520) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38520 - auto-classifying sentence – subclass, English (Z38521) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38521 - Dutch eight-dot Braille encode (Z38531) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38531 - entity supports programming lang-sentence, English (Z38536) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38536 - infobox for sculpture (Z38539) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38539 - simple cite from URL, QIDs and date (Z38542) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38542 - arguments of an anonymous function (Z38552) https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z38552

A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ListObjectsByType?type=Z8&orderby=latest is available.