This is the Abstract Wikipedia Project chat. This is where discussions on the project happen. Add your discussion below this line. More technical issues should go to Abstract Wikipedia:Report a technical problem.
@Feeglgeef, @Tenshi Hinanawi: Sorry about that; it was due to a production mis-configuration that I've worked around for now. Unfortunately the same bug also meant that the community's first Abstract articles were all mis-created into the Abstract Wikipedia: namespace, and I don't think we can move them into the proper positions right now, so they'll need to be re-created. Please reply here, on Abstract Wikipedia:Report a technical problem, or file any issues you run into in Phabricator. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 12 days ago3 comments3 people in discussion
This is just a celebratory post acknowledging the milestone of getting this project started. Great work on the engineering team so far, now we can get some community creating content as well! Ainali (talk) 18:53, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I want to contribute but I'm a bit lost with the function editor so I'll wait until some documentation is uploaded on the community page. Hathor1719 (talk) 18:55, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I tried purging, it doesn't help. Interestingly, if I change the interface language to English, I get the new link, but not when I use it in Swedish. A bug, or do we need to define this for each language? ♥Ainalidiskussionbidrag12:48, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 12 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I switched my user interface language to Hebrew. I'm trying to create a page. There's a plus button under "lead paragraph (Q8776414)". It has several items that begin with "Add" and continue with English strings that are probably function names: "section title", "paragraph", "HTML unordered list", etc. I tried using uselang=qqx to see what functions those are, but then the editing interface is not loaded at all. I see a yellow box with this text:
(wikilambda-initialize-error)
(wikilambda-renderer-error-footer-project-chat)
uselang=qqx works quite nicely in Wikifunctions and shows ZIDs of objects when their labels are used in the interface, but it seems to fail here. It would be quite nice to make it work. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 19:06, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 12 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The first time I posted something here on this page (using DiscussionTools), I noticed a mistake and wanted to fix it. I clicked "edit" near the section heading, and it started editing the whole page in Visual editor. If I recall correctly, the default on other wikis is that the edit button next to the section heading on discussion pages opens only that section and in the wikitext editor. It should probably be the same here. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 19:10, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 days ago7 comments2 people in discussion
I'm requesting temporary adminship here (for 24 hours to a week) to help set up the wiki on the community side. As administrator on Wikifunctions, I designed the current layout of the main page (also used locally), among other things. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:16, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Feeglgeef: while I agree that temporary adminship could be useful, both personally and as a steward, I'm not sure it's a good idea to grant this request. First of all, you didn't really say why you need admin rights (and your history, both on Wikifunctions and Meta, make me want to be extra cautious). In the meantime, stewards and global admins can also (and already do) help if needed, don't hesitate to ask. Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 21:36, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Ah, right! Please update the main page as I've requested on its talk page, as well as delete the existing pages on the Abstract Wikipedia namespace with QIDs (they are now redundant), and add the correct license to MediaWiki:License. I have a few more things, but they're relatively minor. Consider the above request retracted. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:29, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@VIGNERON: I wanted you to do the things I asked in the above reply (which you ignored:(. ). The main page is fixed and the license is fine (not complete, but alas), but any page following the pattern "Abstract Wikipedia:Q[n]" should be deleted. Feeglgeef (talk) 17:57, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 day ago8 comments3 people in discussion
I was about to import a few templates that can come in handy in discussions and other meta-related activities but then realized that it may be a great use case for abstract content. Or will it not be possible to do it in that way on this wiki (or at all)? Ainali (talk) 19:28, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Calling functions here is currently possible, but some templates are impossible to replace and functions are inconvenient in any case. It'd be helpful if you said which templates you intended to import, but generally I'd say import them. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:33, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think what I wonder most is if we always should do multilingual templates with the traditional <translate> tags or use functions wherever we can. Ainali (talk) 19:42, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
The problem with "functions wherever we can" is that most template-like functions are content based, like abbr or 0. I'm assuming you mean templates that are more about meta stuff, which probably should not be functions, at least under the current idea. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:46, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
It's not written down, I suppose. I didn't mean there was a rule against creating the functions, (feel free, if you'd like). The main problem with putting them on Wikifunctions is speed and the fact that you must use HTML fragments (no wikitext), which to me makes it unreasonable. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:56, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
That's a fair point of view. The reason I asked was that it would be an excellent way of Q3033752 (note to self, we need the functionality of d:Template:Q). If we get used here to not falling back into wikitext, we get more training at creating excellent abstract content. Ainali (talk) 20:03, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I haven’t tried an embedded function on an AW Project page, so I suppose I should… if you’ll forgive me!
Latest comment: 12 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello all! To those not on the telegram (or not following), articles are now able to be created in the correct way. Any articles you have previously made will need to be recreated. I'd courtesy ping those who have already created one but it seems we don't have that set up yet! Feeglgeef (talk) 22:31, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 days ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I have set the UI to Spanish and there are some menus not translated (Create an article in the sidebar, for example). Where can I translate the content I see missing?
Also, I tried to create a very simple abstract article on the environment (Q43619) and it fails to render (Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Alcanzado el límite de tiempo en el Orquestador): I also found a random, decently big one (Q408) and it keeps loading for five minutes already in Spanish.
Finally, if this is going to be with the purpose of multi lingual edition, shouldn't help and talk pages like these be also automatically translated? Because otherwise it becomes just an output of information, an editor who isn't familiar with English would be able to read the Abstract Wikipedia in their language but unable to provide feedback (as I'm doing now). Hathor1719 (talk) 06:56, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I am not sure that we want "automatic" translation. But regular translation, I truly agree that we should have. There is a Phabricator created to enable the Translate extension on this wiki (Phab:T420656). ♥Ainalidiskussionbidrag07:42, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yes at least the ability to translate user messages, so that I for example could read the messages in this page in Spanish and reply in Spanish, and the rest of users translate them to their local languages. Otherwise cross-lingual collaborative effort isn't going to work unless everyone has a decent level of English as a second language. Thank you for the link! Hathor1719 (talk) 08:42, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I would greatly appreciate automatic per-comment translation (the way Discourse implements it), and hope we find a way to implement that for the truly multilingual sites like this. In the wiki spirit, the outputs of the automatic translation should be savable and editable so that a) the computation of auto-translation only happens once into each target language and b) everyone can improve each of those translations. Sj (talk) 21:23, 22 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
It seems like when creating an article you cannot insert a function ID (i.e. Z6839) in a function call's function field and you have to type in it's name and hope it pops up (which it seems as though it doesn't always). VivianIsBee (talk) 13:13, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Not showing functions that return strings where an HTML fragment is needed
Latest comment: 11 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
It might be good to adjust the search function inside the abstract wikipedia editor to show functions that return strings as grayed-out where an HTML fragment is needed, as it took me a while to realize that label of item reference in specific/general lang returns a string and not an HTML fragment, meaning that it doesn't show up when searching. VivianIsBee (talk) 13:30, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 days ago11 comments5 people in discussion
Hi, I wanted to try generating an article in lorrain (d:Q671198), but it does not appear in the selection list. Where can I ask for it to be added, so that I can try experimenting with it?
I'm not certain, but I know it's a bit of a process that I think begins on Wikidata. Even if it were added, there would be no support for it in community-made functions, so for the foreseeable future this will be impossible. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:54, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I see no reason for not adding this to our list of languages, after all we already have plenty of languages, including dialects like f:Z1640. @Poslovitch: does this mean you are volunteering to create wikifunctions in lorrain 🤣 Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 09:50, 21 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@VIGNERON Of course! I suppose this means the fonctions will need to support the many ways to write in lorrain, since it is not standardized. Do you have any examples of functions that support such things? Poslovitch (talk) 09:54, 21 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I tried creating a "Natural language" object on Wikifunctions, but it seems I don't have permission to do this. <rant>Why is it always so hard with languages that have no ISO codes :sob: </rant>Poslovitch (talk) 13:32, 21 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I tried to create it and it shows "The provided title 'Main_Page' is not valid for an Abstract Article.", also tried to change the content model to wikitext and shows the same error. Note that I also have the similar technical rights as admin. @Koavf, is there another way you'd try if you're an administrator? Tanbiruzzaman (talk) 03:44, 27 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 day ago6 comments5 people in discussion
I'm aware that we're only a few days into the public beta of this project, and everything is a little rough around the edges, but I thought it could be useful to come up with some goals to work towards in order to make the site more accommodating and easier to contribute to, for newer and more experienced editors alike. (If there's a place where this discussion is already taking place please tell me and I can move there).
Here are some thoughts I had so far:
Most of the current articles are extremely short, just one or two sentences long. I think it would be good to pick one article in each of a few main categories (e.g. one country, one type of food, one notable person, etc.) and work to try to include as much relevant information as possible, to serve as an example for future articles of similar types.
As I understand it, a lot of the limitations for what kind of information we can include in an article is due to which functions exist on Wikifunctions. We have Abstract Wikipedia:Useful functions for article composition, which is a good way to find some functions, but this list can't include every single function, so it would be good to have some way to find relevant functions on Wikifunctions. Is there a category containing AWP-related functions there? I'm not too familiar with Wikifunctions yet but if there is a category, we should link it there.
In a similar vein, it seems like there are very few such functions currently available. It would be good to have some kind of guide as to how to create such functions that can be used here. I tried creating a new function there yesterday and it took me a while to find my way around, and I still haven't figured it out completely, so a guide specifically for people wanting to improve Abstract Wikipedia could be useful.
Lastly it might be worth coming up with a list of policies and guidelines that we want to make to begin with. Currently there are none, and obviously it's quite time consuming to create new policies, but coming up with a set of basic ones would be helpful I think.
I support the goal of making it easier to contribute. From my point of view a place where people can write example sentences in specific languages about specific facts and can request a function for it will be useful. So far I it is difficult for me to understand how it is possible to define content in a abstract way and convert it into texts in different natural languages. It seems to me like it requires to much available data at functions and Wikidata Lexemes what is not there for many small languages so far. So I prefer a monolingual approach based on Wikidata statements. Then people can write sentences what explain a specific Wikidata statement or multiple ones and this can be done for many languages. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:49, 21 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I do agree that creating these linguistic functions would be easier if we had a guide, though it's not exactly a cut and paste process (it requires a lot of thinking to figure out edge cases, whether your use case makes sense across languages, what will be included in the scope of your function, what will not be, what the utility will be, etc.). An example of thinking this out poorly is f:Z31405, where it's painfullyy clear that the Abstract Wikipedia team didn't think these questions through well enough, where the description says that they couldn't even decide whether the function would output a phrase or a noun, there is little to no utility in composing articles, and the edge cases are insurmountable with their current approach.
It's not exactly the same, but I've noted on the telegram that we should make it easier to make new language versions of existing functions. Unlike object labels, however, that requires either programming experience or a very in-depth tutorial, which we do not have. The lack of language-versions is natural if you think about it (if 1% of the world can make a Wikifunctions function and 1% can translate the concepts effectively between the languages we want, 0.01% can help us here), so the tutorial route seems like the only logical method. Spreading awareness as to contributing this way on the main page could also be helpful Feeglgeef (talk) 00:35, 22 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, some kind of tutorial would be phenomenal. There could be some walk-through tutorials for creating some basic linguistic functions. That seems to be the bottleneck to progress here - practically all sentences follow the format "X is Y".
I've been looking forward to Abstract for awhile now (finding out it released yesterday, a bit too late), but it's completely unapproachable - it feels like I need a master's degree in both Computer Science and Linguistics in order to contribute to the growth of this project. It's a new project, sure, but it took at least an hour to write two sentences in Q711 (Mongolia). Doesn't help that I only speak English. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 05:41, 27 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 days ago4 comments2 people in discussion
As Abstract Wikipedia can help small Wikipedia language versions offering more content in this language I think it is important to try to get people from such projects involved. From my point of view the highest chance to get it done is if people who know people contributing to small language version talk to the contributors and invite them to contribute to Abstract Wikipedia. In Wikifunctions I expected more involvement of small language versions and I think it is important to make it easier to contribute and find a way how to communicate with people who do not speak English. As it is not the case everyone can speak this language. What do you think how is it possible to get more people from small Wikipedia language versions involved in Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:55, 21 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Have you tried to call Wikifunctions functions in the Incubatorwiki. I think adding language specific implementatations is the first step. It seems to me like simple sentences can be generated through calling Wikifunctions functions and so for this no Abstract Wikipedia is required. — Hogü-456 (talk) 20:38, 22 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 day ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Is it possible to call an abstract Wikipedia article with a URL-Parameter specifying the language. I looked for random pages and I got examples without a german Implementation. I am interested in sharing an example and for this I want to set a link people can klick on to get the result in the expected language afterwards. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:43, 22 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 hour ago10 comments5 people in discussion
Some functions that produce sentences seem to have language-specific functions for every language, I.e. "Brazilian Sign Language: article-less defining". Why is this? What functions have this multiplicity? I thought one point of AWP was to have language-independend functions, all of which have specifications for how they would render outputs in different languages (where the choice of output language is decided at the client, or at the final step of rendering, not for each function in turn). Sj (talk) 21:23, 22 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
This is just a side effect of how Wikifunctions works. Essentially the generic "Article-less defining fragment" checks which language you want, and then calls the language-specific version. You should only use the generic ones in abstract articles. {{GearsDatapacks|talk|contribs}}21:50, 22 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Aha thanks, then the interface should probably not be showing the hundreds of language-specific ones in the selector drop-down for editors. Sj (talk) 18:55, 23 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Agreed, although I'm not sure how easy it would be to filter them out; there's not really anything distinguishing them from the general functions, they're both functions that take some input and return monolingual text as output. Maybe worth opening a phabricator ticket to get the opinion of people on the technical side of Abstract Wikipedia. {{GearsDatapacks|talk|contribs}}19:39, 23 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yes. I think this reveals that there are (at least) two kinds of functions on Wikifunctions. Those that are (mainly) helper functions (although they may be useful for external reuse or in abstract articles about a language) and Abstract-ready functions. Having a way to mark them as such on Wikidata, and then by default filter on Wikifunctions would increase usability a lot. ♥Ainalidiscussioncontributions08:22, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I agree that we need to be able to reduce the noise when finding functions.
I also agree that it would be very valuable to create function categories and be able to filter when searching.
I also agree that defaulting on AW to "top-level" functions is a good idea.
Oh, ok, I agree. My prototype to extract statistics could be used to find sll top level html functions.
We could limit it to functions over a certain number to not count the built in functions.
We could do quite a lot of work with the data to help people gaps. E.g. most used functions in AW missing support for Swedish for example. 😀 So9q (talk) 20:17, 31 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 days ago8 comments4 people in discussion
How should the concept of "it" be represented in abstract wikipedia? Otherwise it leads to a lot of sentences like "Brussels is the capital of Belgium. Brussels is a large city. Brussels is...". Also, is there any plans for some form of easier to understand "authoring language" or something? The current approach with writing wikifunctions is hard to understand and write. VivianIsBee (talk) 19:35, 23 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Every concept is represented in Abstract Wikipedia through its Wikidata item, which would be d:Q6091500 in this case. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by an "authoring language" (some sample texts of your idea would be helpful), but I don't think there's much improvement to be had while still writing in an abstract language (that is to say, most improvements would make the language more concrete). Feeglgeef (talk) 20:18, 23 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I mean more like a format easier to work with than wikifunctions. Like some form of computer-parsable conlang which can be "compiled" into wikifunctions. VivianIsBee (talk) 20:47, 23 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
This is a tough problem, because the pronoun you would use is semantically different in different languages. I think we have to make a "refer to previously-mentioned" function that takes a Wikidata item, reads properties like person or object, (linguistic) gender, etc, and spits out a pronoun. Hopefully it can be done that simply. Snowmanonahoe (talk) 18:41, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah that would make sense. I can try to draft one for English (that's the only language I know at least for now) so we can get a proof of concept. VivianIsBee (talk) 18:48, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Ooh. I could be wrong but I think wikidata doesn't have a property for "grammatical gender". For English I'll probably match on P21 and if it's an instance of Q5, and if it doesn't have P21 and is an instance of Q5 do they/them, if not an instance of Q5 and doesn't have P21 it/its, and otherwise match on P21. Also we'll need multiple "refer to" functions for different types of pronouns (possessive, nominative, etc). VivianIsBee (talk) 18:57, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
About the grammatical gender property: yeah, you're probably right. That's the tough part, because we're going to need individual properties for every language with grammatical gender. See the similar discussion about classifier/measure words and articles below. Snowmanonahoe (talk) 19:06, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 day ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Is there a possiblity to see all languages an article can be displayed in. I looked at Q2290517 and it seems like there is not yet a German version for this article. From my point of view knowing what articles are missing in the language of interest is important for working on abstract articles. As I looked at random pages I got a timeout as my user interface is in German and the generation of the article in German was not sucessful. So I think it is also necessary for checking if the article can be displayed in the user interface language. Hogü-456 (talk) 21:17, 24 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
It would be great if it were clearer which was the first (or all, if possible) function that failed to render in a language to help the user go make necessary additions on Wikifunctions. ♥Ainalidiscussioncontributions08:24, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I agree, I recently wrote the team and suggested a clear backtrace so the user can see an overview of the chain of functions and steps in which step failed in which function.
I'm imagining something like the GitHub actions job pipeline overview, where you can easily see the process and the output from the failing step. So9q (talk) 06:41, 31 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 days ago34 comments9 people in discussion
This is a big mistake, and it's best we fix it now. Anything relating to particular languages or even groups of languages needs to stay all the way out of the generic functions. Languages have different rules for articles, some of them don't even have articles. This kind of thing cannot be reconciled at the general function-level.
As to the alternate way we deal with this, that's a little tougher. My first thought is a bunch of Wikidata properties that tell you whether an article precedes an entity's label in a particular language. That idea could work, but there are some obvious problems:
Are there languages where the presence of an article is contextual, too?
No one will fill these properties, especially in languages other than English, because we will accumulate dozens of them that have to go on every single word ever
Can you give me an example of a language where this distinction actively prevents the functions from working? Some languages do not have articles, but that just means that the two are interchangeable. Feeglgeef (talk) 13:26, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Trivially.
Golf on enwiki: "Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit a ball into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible."
Golf on eswiki: "El golf es un deporte cuyo objetivo es introducir una bola en los hoyos que están distribuidos en el campo con el menor número de golpes, utilizando para cada tipo de golpe uno de entre un conjunto de palos ligeramente diferentes entre sí, ya que la cabeza del palo tiene ángulos distintos, al igual que las varillas tienen longitudes diferentes."
That's not a meaningful difference, though, and both examples use Z26039. Z26039 and Z26095 have different semantic meanings, they aren't stylistic choices. Feeglgeef (talk) 16:01, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yes. "The" has no semantic meaning, but there is a semantic difference between "A bird is a dinosaur" and "Bird is a dinosaur" (The latter is about a specific animal names Bird). Feeglgeef (talk) 21:06, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
It does though, no? See Wiktionary's second example:
You live on Main Street, don't you? You know, you should tell the mayor the street needs cleaning.
Generally it's used to refer to a singular identifiable instance (there's more definitions, but this is the primary one), which I think is definitely enough to put it outside of "no semantic meaning". Infernostars (talk) 21:18, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I can understand it perfectly fine if you remove "the", though. The fact that the thing can be obviously identified with "the" means that it can be obviously identified without it. It's convenient, though. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:21, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
The solution you're proposing to the problem at hand is pretty much "completely abandon grammatical articles in every language except English". You're right that it's not the end of the world, but we should at least try to solve the problem first. Snowmanonahoe (talk) 21:26, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
No. That's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm disputing your insinuation that something is wrong with our current approach. We can solve any stylistic problems on a language by language basis, and semantic problems in the abstract content. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:09, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
No, I just checked and Wikidata doesn't have a property for this yet. We would need to do a decent amount of workshopping to define such a property well for the proposal there (it wouldn't just be "Chinese classifier for"; I think something like "Chinese count-classifier for"? The count-classifiers that simply disappear in Germanic languages are the real concern, as the mass-classifiers can generally be paired with the noun to translate into an English word) but I think it could work barring some edge cases.
My main concern is if fundamentally we want to solve these sorts of problems this way. If so, we're going to be asking Wikidata to make hundreds if not thousands of properties over the coming months. Is that the best way to do this? I'm wondering if anyone has a better idea. Snowmanonahoe (talk) 18:15, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
And... is it going to work? How many Wikidata items only have a label in one or two languages as-is? This is only going to exacerbate that problem by quadrupling the work to translate a word, and putting us basically at square one. Snowmanonahoe (talk) 18:27, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Snowmanonahoe There is d:Property:P5978 which can be used to say that a particular lexeme sense is used with a specific classifier (not just in Mandarin but also in languages like Malay), as well as d:Property:P10927 which can indicate the reverse relation (but for parsimony's sake should point to more general classes rather than to every applicable sense in existence). Mahir256 (talk) 20:53, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Snowmanonahoe re: your first sentence, I suspect that most people with questions here are clueless about lexemes (something the Abstract Wikipedia team made a grave mistake in not properly having addressed before this launch). In general links go from lexeme senses to items and not the other way around, with several properties available to do so, and while there is a Wikifunction to go from an item to a lexeme, I cannot endorse the current method of composing abstract articles (see my reply under "Authoring Language" below) enough to mention what Wikifunction that is. Mahir256 (talk) 21:11, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
You don't even know about Lexemes, much less the complexities of the project. You come into the project chat without the slightest sliver of a clue and then tell everyone that they are "making a big mistake." Perhaps next time you could phrase it like "What is the distinction between these two functions? Does this not present concerns about XYZ?" ~2026-18688-73 (talk) 02:09, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I agree there is a problem with the current approach. My proposed solution: I'm hoping the top level call from Abstract Wikipedia will be optionally allowed to send parameters like the grammatical number "plural" of the subject, which could be considered by the specific language alongside other context about the subject/object item to formulate the grammar (e.g. f:Z32496), and by the time it gets to the English constructor (e.g. f:Z32410), the English function will have the "subject is plural" boolean set (to decide "has"/"have" as well as the articles). I'm working on this particular example and all the required helper functions. If the English version works, I'll seek to make a configuration that allows similar in other languages. PS off topic, but I also think we will often want these functions to return HTML not monolingual text, so that we can embed hyperlinks. --99of9 (talk) 02:37, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I’m not sure we want to favour particular features; don’t we simply want to determine the relevant set of lexemes for an item/language pairing? We don’t have selective fetch for lexemes, so the set may need to be limited, but identifying the more salient lexemes still requires considering the full set, unless we filter by “lexical similarity” between the item’s labels and/or aliases and the lexeme’s lemma and/or forms. GrounderUK (talk) 13:58, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I’m not objecting to anything, although the notion of “sending” is a little alien in a functional context. The problem is knowing which features (predicates) are most salient. I guess it’s simply an optimisation, so further relevant details can be fetched later if the context requires them. But I’d still think in terms of filtered statement sets, and perhaps different filters per language. If we’re going to be language specific, it’s natural to consider extending the selective fetch to include sense-related lexemes. GrounderUK (talk) 11:26, 27 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 days ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Wikifunctions are kind of a pain to work with directly (no offense to the creators of them, they're an amazing platform and overall very impressive, just kind of by their nature they are built to be more abstract and closer to lambda calculus over "regular" programming languages), and that extends to Abstract Wikipedia. Has it been thought about making a sort of "authoring language" that is easier to work with than directly using Wikifunctions, but then "compiles" directly to Wikifunctions? My idea is sort of making a computer-parsable, natural language-agnostic conlang or even just some sort of custom markup language that could optionally be used to write abwiki articles and then would be stored along with the compiled wikifunctions and a timestamp of last compile so if an update was made then previous articles could be recompiled automatically. I'm of course not one of the abwiki staff members, so if this doesn't fit the "spirit" of it or something let me know, but I think it'd be helpful. VivianIsBee (talk) 19:14, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I proposed adding support for Spreadsheetfunctions to Wikifunctions. It is better than defining a new language. From my point of view there are in relation to other programming languages many people who can write spreadsheet functions and they are translated into many different natural languages. In the past I did some experiments regarding the automatical conversion of Spreadsheet functions into the programming language R. I am interested in defining an Abstract Article in an Spreadsheet and I think it is possible. It is from my point of view important to lower the barrer to create an Abstract Article and creating functions in Wikifunctions. Maybe the goal of making it abstract makes it more complicated and language specific functions are easier to create for many people. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:25, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 days ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Heya! Been working on the page Q778 [and thus the Z26570 function] - is there a way to check if a word needs a definite article [i.e. the] or not? Right now it's "The Bahamas is an island country in Caribbean." which is close but needs a definite article [before Caribbean]. But I can't just always add it, since cases like "Lubeck is a city in the Germany." would be wrong. Is there any solution for this yet? Infernostars (talk) 21:06, 25 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
The reason was that the argument to Z32645 is a Wikidata item reference, not a Wikidata item. I've fixed it now. But I switched it so that it only adds the definite article when the Kleenean is absolutely True, more than Maybe. I hope I will be able to achieve that for Caribbean, although it doesn't currently do so. I'll keep working on it today. --99of9 (talk) 00:20, 27 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 5 days ago13 comments3 people in discussion
I find the current GUI editor to be quite clunky and harder for more complex topics.
I'm assuming there is some way that I can edit the code of pages, so I can more quickly write functions without clicking through GUIs. Like I heavily doubt someone wrote Q15433043 by clicking through GUIs.
Also, does anyone know of a function that concats two strings with a space in between? Would I just use Z21394, adding a space between two calls to objects (i.e. "Mars" + " " + "Jupiter")? EatingCarBatteries (talk) 20:19, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
There are several, but I think they are best left to language-specific functions on Wikifunctions. How do you know that a space is required? GrounderUK (talk) 20:42, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
For example, in Mongolia, I would like to write "Ulaanbaatar is the capital and largest city of Mongolia". As of now, I would have to write that in two separate sentences and be very repetitive. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 20:46, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
There’s a long journey ahead of us. At this stage I’d be thinking more in terms of f:Z32163. At least that way we can join adjacent sentences more naturally, when we have appropriate functions to do that. And we can implement “paragraph” differently according to the target language, without having to change the existing abstract content. GrounderUK (talk) 21:07, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah that's what I expected, the project has just started after all. Thanks for this.
How are you finding these functions? I'm having trouble locating them. Also, is there a way that I can copy and paste functions from one article to another in the case of cookie-cutter articles? EatingCarBatteries (talk) 21:45, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
You can copy individual function calls in edit mode. Just click on the three vertical dots and select Copy to clipboard. This is currently specific to a particular browser and site, so you cannot copy between Wikifunctions and AW. You can also copy parts of calls by clicking on the three horizontal dots GrounderUK (talk) 22:26, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
It depends what you mean by “underlying code”. All articles are a list of one or more sections containing function calls. You can add and remove sections (apart from the first) and move sections up and down. Within a section, you can move function calls up and down, but you can only move a function call (or part of one) from one section to another by using the clipboard. The real underlying code is the functions themselves, and these can be amended on Wikifunctions. GrounderUK (talk) 22:44, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
For tips on finding functions, please see f:Wikifunctions:Find. It is also helpful to look at other AW articles, of course. On Wikifunctions, you can look at a related function’s implementations or test cases, as these may reference broader or narrower functions. And “What links here” is available from the Tools menu. GrounderUK (talk) 22:38, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 days ago5 comments2 people in discussion
I created and am attempting to edit Q687168. It is difficult to figure out what is going on because I am stuck at a visual editor. I would like to play around with comparing it to code on other pages, but the visual thing makes that pretty difficult. Also is there a way to edit things in a sandbox or something so I can experiment without it being in mainspace? Immanuelle (talk) 23:25, 27 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Code-based (as in, the underlying form articles are stored in, which was temporarily visible due to a bug when the wiki was just being set up) editing is currently not possible, and I'm not sure if the development team has any plan to implement it (cc @Jdforrester (WMF):). As for your issue, you should not be using a literal string, but a function call instead, which allows you to use one of the functions on Wikifunctions (how to pictured). Though the project is in its early days, a general guide on creating articles is available at Help:How to create an article with links to other helpful pages. As for sandboxes, you can subscribe to the task on Phabricator if you have an account there. How to convert to function callFeeglgeef (talk) 00:40, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Well I really hope that they implement code editing because wikidata is okay since it only has properties. But these functions are just too much. I feel like I should be able to relatively easily take code from one article and put it on another one. Immanuelle (talk) 02:58, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
You can use the copying feature! If you click the 3 dots next to a function call you get an option to copy, which you can then paste elsewhere using the same 3 dots. Feeglgeef (talk) 03:06, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 2 days ago12 comments6 people in discussion
How are non-English speakers (who this project is specifically for) meant to develop this wiki's practices and policies if a) all project pages are only available in English, and discussion is largely done in English, and b) there's no attempt to get non-en.wiki communities onboard. At present this looks like it's just going to produce Anglocentric/Eurocentric content, which belies the whole point of having a wiki in one's native language. Yes it's early days and everyone is experimenting and bug-fixing, but the project has already been released to community control, with a predominantly English-speaking/European community. This needs to be put on ice until it can be launched properly with multilingual support and invitations to all wikis, particularly smaller ones. Kowal2701 (talk) 11:44, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
There’s being "not perfect" where things can be improved at a later date, and then there's having antithetical foundations. Also see re functions. Kowal2701 (talk) 16:15, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
You haven't named a single thing that can't be improved at a later date. We're hoping to be able to translate project pages. Non-enwiki communities can be gotten on board later. Function generation already works multilingually in many cases, and those where it does not can be improved. Feeglgeef (talk) 16:57, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Kowal2701 Thank you for your concerns. We are already aiming at less-served communities through specific calls to action to create more language functions and abstract content in their language. Just give the time to actually see these changes happen. Cheers, Sannita (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Sannita, I'm just wondering how are AW project pages planned to be translated in the future? Is there going to be use of some kind of automated tool such as DeepL or Google Translate, or will it be a custom-designed system? EatingCarBatteries (talk) 20:39, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
But so far, this early start of the not fully polished project allows us to learn so incredibly much. In the last few days we have learned so much more than we would have been able without the launch in months! And it helps us to focus on where to put our limited resources, so that we can make the overall project better quicker than would have been possible otherwise. From that perspective, this has been quite a success.
I am trying to understand your suggestion: what do you think would need to be in place before a possible relaunch? Which requirements would need to be met? --DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 13:53, 29 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you, I wasn't aware of that. Some uninformed thoughts below.
Re communication: ideally people would communicate using functions, and there'd be some kind of visual editor where people type in their native language and it gets translated into functions, but I realise that's a pipe dream. Something that allows people who don't have a mutual language to communicate is imo necessary, maybe there could be a tool that machine translates comments. Machine translation sucks, but so long as people get the gist of what is being said, that'd be better than nothing. I dread to think what disputes would be like though.
Re invitations, idk what has already been done, but I would've thought now would the time to get some people from smaller wikis editing and experimenting, just an invitation on a wiki's main noticeboard would probably do the trick (is there a meta:MassMessage service for updates re Abstract wiki that could be recommended?). Then a central or watchlist notice for the actual launch, hopefully by which time there'd already be a small group of editors able to assist the influx of newbies. An intuitive tutorial is also necessary, as well as an intuitive version of f:Wikifunctions:Catalogue. Kowal2701 (talk) 18:14, 29 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
What do you think about boilerplate templates. So writing a sentence and then marking the parts of the sentence what can be derived from Wikidataitems or the lexeme linked to it. This seems to me like an realistic approach for making it easier to contribute. I am happy you wrote about the predominantly English-speaking/European community involved in this project. It seems like it is different to contribute so far and I had the expectation people from small language versions come on their own and contribute also if they dont speak English. So far it seems to be not the case and I hope it will be easier to contribute. I think for the beginning the goal of Abstract Wikipedia should be generating sentences based on data. So supporting small language versions should be not the goal of the first phase as it seems to take some time and improvements of the structures to make it easier to contribute. Sharing the work and offering people help with creating an function for an specific sentence can be a important way of getting more content in Abstract Wikipedia. Maybe it is unrealistic to find a huge number of people who are interested in writing functions who generate text. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:58, 29 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I've created Q79097672, an article for a woman singer. In gendered languages however, it defaults to using masculine words. An example: in Portuguese, it reads "Arlo Parks é um cantor", when it should be "Arlo Parks é uma cantora". Is there any fix to this? Skyshifter (talk) 23:49, 28 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yes. But each language is handled separately. I think Italian is doing it. German was started but got stuck… it should be working here soon. GrounderUK (talk) 00:48, 29 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Why don't we just structure this with wikitemplates?
Latest comment: 1 day ago4 comments2 people in discussion
I feel like the project could be done a lot better by using templates kind of like how wikipedia does them. Just the entire thing is templates that can be rendered in many languages. So like Q106289265 would have the content \{\{Z26039|Q7257\}\}\ and could even have some aliasing done across languages so it could be \{\{subject is|Q7257\}\}\. Code would be editable with a regular visual editor or code editor. Immanuelle (talk) 04:34, 29 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
This is available in pages when Parsoid rendering is enabled. We don't use this becuase it doesn't make sense for constructing and editing massive articles. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:37, 29 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 hours ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Is it possible in the future for this project to have things that automatically query wikidata? Like an infobox that gives people's spouses, or a function that queries a specific property on wikidata Immanuelle (talk) 20:10, 29 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
What’s “long term” about it? We already have functions that query specific properties on Wikidata, f:Z32431 being a simple example. A list of spouses seems like a fairly simple function too, although there might be performance issues if there are a lot of spouses. GrounderUK (talk) 22:01, 31 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 day ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Something that has always irked me with Wikidata, Wikifunctions, and now Abstract Wiki is that there are no search suggestions when you are searching in other namespaces in the search bar. For example, if I were to type "Abstract Wikipedia:", nothing shows up. Whereas on enwiki, you can do this just fine. Is this because these sites are using a more "modified" version of MediaWiki? EatingCarBatteries (talk) 04:38, 30 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@EatingCarBatteries, @Feeglgeef: The search interface indeed is designed to only search the Wikidata concepts that would take up the main namespace. This is conceptually the same as the search on Wikidata.org. We'd welcome Phabricator tasks for ideas on how to additionally provide wikitext community page search, though implementing that might not be a priority. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 12:11, 30 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hint: don’t use the Search bar…
When it is empty, click the adjacent Search button. This takes you to the Search page.
Type the namespace with final colon. You are prompted with available pages and the prompt is refined as you type.
Click a page title in the suggestions or click Search for a full search in the entered namespace.
Latest comment: 1 day ago1 comment1 person in discussion
In vector2009 and monobook, the logo shows as the standard enwiki logo. Which is confusing as this is technically a whole other sisterproject. I suggest this be used as a temporary logo for these skins. Kinopiko (talk) 06:00, 31 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
