Wikifunctions is a new site that has been added to the list of sites operated by WMF. I definitely see uses for it in automating updates on Wikipedia and bots (and also for programmers to reference), but their goal is to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic information. I have mixed feelings about this, as I don’t like existing programs that automatically generate articles (see the Cebuano and Dutch Wikipedias), and I worry that the system will be too complicated for average people.
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Sounds like a great idea. Plain English (or any human language) is not the best way to store information. I’ve certainly noticed mismatches between the data in different languages, or across related articles, because they don’t share the same data source.
Take a look at the article for NYC in English and French and you’ll see a bunch of data points, like total area, that are different. Not huge differences, but any difference at all is enough to demonstrate the problem. There should be one canonical source of data shared by all representations.
Wikipedia is available in hundreds of languages. Why should hundreds of editors need to update the NYC page every time a new census comes out with new population numbers? Ideally, that would require only one change to update every version of the article.
In programming, the convention is to separate the data from the presentation. In this context, plain-English is the presentation, and weaving actual data into it is sub-optimal. Something like population or area size of a city is not language-dependent, and should not be stored in a language-dependent way.
Ultimately, this is about reducing duplicate effort and maintaining data integrity.
but their goal is to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic information
That’ll get unruly really fast.
Languages simply don’t agree on how to split the usage of words. Or grammatical case. Or if, when and how to do agreement.
Just for the sake of example: how are they going to keep track of case in a way that doesn’t break Hindi, or Basque, or English, or Guarani? Or grammatical gender for a word like “milk”? (not even the Romance languages agree in it.) At a certain point, it gets simply easier to write the article in all those languages than to code something to make it for you.
I think that the best use scenario is to automate tidbits of highly changing data. It’s fairly limited but it could be useful.
Languages simply don’t agree on how to split the usage of words. Or grammatical case. Or if, when and how to do agreement.
Just for the sake of example: how are they going to keep track of case in a way that doesn’t break Hindi, or Basque, or English, or Guarani? Or grammatical gender for a word like “milk”? (not even the Romance languages agree in it.) At a certain point, it gets simply easier to write the article in all those languages than to code something to make it for you.
I don’t know what the WMF is planning here but what you’re pointing out is precisely what abstraction would solve.
If you had an abstract way to represent a sentence, you would be independent of any one order or case or whatever other grammatical feature. In the end you obviously do need actual sentences with these features. To get these, you’d build a mechanism that would convert the abstract sentence representation into a concrete sentences for specific languages that is correctly constructed according to those specific languages’ rules.
Same with gender. What you’d store would not be that e.g. some german sentence is talking about the feminine milk but rather that it’s talking about the abstract concept of milk. How exactly that abstract concept is represented in words would then be up to individual languages to decide.
I have absolutely no idea whether what I’m talking about here would be practical to implement but it in theory it could work.
They’re just going to write all the articles in lojban.
Your description doesn’t seem to match what the site does? For example the front page has a function that converts uppercase text to lowercase text.
It’s not article content - it’s an interactive utility.
