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arXiv:2004.04733cs.CY

Architecture for a multilingual Wikipedia

Denny Vrandečić

Abstract

Wikipedia's vision is a world in which everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge. In its first two decades, this vision has been very unevenly achieved. One of the largest hindrances is the sheer number of languages Wikipedia needs to cover in order to achieve that goal. We argue that we need a new approach to tackle this problem more effectively, a multilingual Wikipedia where content can be shared between language editions. This paper proposes an architecture for a system that fulfills this goal. It separates the goal in two parts: creating and maintaining content in an abstract notation within a project called Abstract Wikipedia, and creating an infrastructure called Wikilambda that can translate this notation to natural language. Both parts are fully owned and maintained by the community, as is the integration of the results in the existing Wikipedia editions. This architecture will make more encyclopedic content available to more people in their own language, and at the same time allow more people to contribute knowledge and reach more people with their contributions, no matter what their respective language backgrounds. Additionally, Wikilambda will unlock a new type of knowledge asset people can share in through the Wikimedia projects, functions, which will vastly expand what people can do with knowledge from Wikimedia, and provide a new venue to collaborate and to engage the creativity of contributors from all around the world. These two projects will considerably expand the capabilities of the Wikimedia platform to enable every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

arXiv comments
22 pages, 6 figures
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CYComputers and Society cs.AIArtificial Intelligence cs.CLComputation and Language

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Linked by 4 identifiable commenters in 5 comments across 2 threads, from Jul 2020 to Jul 2023.

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Discussed in comments2 threads

  1. Welcome to Wikifunctions 1 comment

    • The original paper [0] envisages a much wider scope. Vrandecic literally quotes "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". It also makes the task of the editor much, much more difficult than it is now. [0]…

      tgvView on HNParent context

  2. Abstract Wikipedia 4 comments

    • For reference, this is from the same developer [1] that created Semantic MediaWiki [2] and lead the development of Wikidata [3]. Here's a link to the white paper [4] describing Abstract Wikipedia (and Wikilambda). Considering the success of Wikidata, I'm hopeful this effort…

      NinjaneeredView on HNParent context

    • >> Also I wonder how helpful Prolog infrastructure could be since they provided some useful frameworks [3][4] for that. That's a good point, because looking at the working paper on the proposed architecture of the project [1], the example of a "constructor" in Figure 1 is…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

    • Reminder to link to abstracts, rather than directly to PDF: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733 .

      JadeNBView on HNParent context

    • This is addressed in the white paper describing the project's architecture: 10.2 Machine translation Another widely used approach —mostly for readers, much less for contributors— is the use of automatic translation services like Google Translate. A reader finds an article they…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

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