Round 1 of "abstract content wiki" naming vote ending on Monday
On Monday, 3 November 2025, the first round of the naming competition vote for the wiki for abstract content will close. We have about a hundred proposals right now. There are two voting pages: the top 20 or so proposals for people in a hurry, and the whole list.
This first round aims to result in five to six proposals which then go to a second round that will start on 17 November. Whereas for the first round we try to keep criticisms of the proposals light in the spirit of brainstorming, for the second round we plan to have discussions and summarize pros and cons for the proposals that voters can consult when casting their votes. Everyone will be invited to join us in discussing and formulating these.
Please join us and cast your votes! You can vote for as many proposals as you like. Help us surface the best proposals for round two!
A little birthday gift for Wikidata: an example of short descriptions
This weekend, we celebrate Wikidata's thirteenth birthday! Abstract Wikipedia will participate with two presentations, one by community member Mahir and one by staff engineer Geno. Both are listed below. Congratulations to Wikidata for becoming recognized as a digital public good by the UN-endorsed DPGA!
In this newsletter, we spoke about Abstract Descriptions before: instead of manually writing out and individually storing every description of a Wikidata item in every supported language, why not represent it in an abstract notation and then generate it when needed? This would lead to fewer inconsistencies, and much less work for the community, and could even lead to a reduction in strain for the Wikidata infrastructure.
We set up an example of how that could look, for music albums. Select a music album and a language, and in most cases it should provide you with a more or less suitable short description. For three languages, we created bespoke implementations, each of which follows a frequent pattern we established from looking at descriptions for albums in Wikidata. So, for example for Taylor Swift's album 1989,
- In English, it says "2014 AD album by Taylor Swift", and the community is discussing changing the year display function to drop the AD. Other than that, it follows the pattern of "{year} album by {performer}" used on many albums in English.
- In German, it says "Album von Taylor Swift (2014)", following the pattern "Album von {performer} ({year})", which is common for German short descriptions for albums.
- In Uzbek, we first queried for all fifty or so short descriptions of albums, and asked a native Uzbek Wikipedia community member to rate those, and suggest the best pattern. We implemented that together, and it results now in "Taylor Swift albomi (2014)", following the pattern "{performer} albomi ({year})"
These are the currently configured bespoke functions for short album descriptions. If there is no bespoke function, a default function gets used. That looks for a representation of the item album in the requested language, followed by the performer and year in parentheses. So this results e.g. in Spanish in "álbum (Taylor Swift, 2014)".
In case the result of the default renderer doesn't create a good result for a given language, another language function can be created and added to the language dispatcher configuration. If you want to write such a function for your language, you first need to decide how the result should look like (best to check existing descriptions in Wikidata), then create a new function that takes a Wikidata item reference and a natural language as the inputs and returns a monolingual string, and then implement your function. Take a look at the implementations for English, German, and Uzbek, as examples that could be followed.
And if there is an album where, for one reason or another, the abstract description doesn't create a satisfying result, it can always be overwritten, with either another function, or with a manually written description on Wikidata.
This demonstrates the many different levels of customization that are possible: from a very wide net with the default function, to the very specific manual overwrite for an individual item and language pair, there are many possible places of customization that would be used by more or fewer items, giving the community a level of control that is much higher than individual contributors running bots on their machines.
Note that currently this only demonstrates that writing such short descriptions with Wikifunctions is possible. They are not yet used by Wikidata. We invite you to write more short descriptions! If you think this is a good idea whose implementation should be prioritized, please let the Wikidata team know – e.g. by awarding tokens to the respective task.
Abstract Wikipedia at WikidataCon 2025
This year's WikidataCon will be on 31 October – 2 November 2025. WikidataCon 2025 will be held online, celebrating Wikidata's 13th birthday.
On 1 November 2025 at 09:30 UTC, Genoveva Galarza Heredero will present the session Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia: the Now and the Future.
On 2 November 2025 at 20:00 Berlin time, community member Mahir Morshed will present the session Mad Libs with Wikidata Lexemes and Abstract Content.
We are looking forward to celebrating Wikidata's birthday with the Wikidata community, and for a session exploring Wikidata's role in Abstract Wikipedia! Thanks to Mahir and Geno for hosting their sessions, and thanks to the conference organizers for preparing WikidataCon!
Recent Changes in the software
This week the list of user-facing changes is small: we fixed the built-in implementation of Wrap mono-lingual text. Thank you for your patience while this was being resolved.
News in Types: Fixing floats, rationals, and Wikidata time
With the incredibly patient and diligent work by 99of9, the conversions for the float datatype have been corrected to represent so-called subnormal numbers, which are very small numbers, and to represent special values. Big thanks!
And since 99of9 was on a roll, we also fixed rational numbers. A recursive implementation for GCD was replaced with an iterative one, which allowed us to pass tests for very large numbers. (If you want to see how large the numbers are, you can see them here).
Also the JavaScript converter functions for Wikidata time were completed and connected. They were also used to implement a new function, Later Wikidata time, which in turn has been used in Most recent qualified statement.
Volunteer's Corner on November 3
The next Volunteers' Corner will be this coming Monday, 3 November at 18:30 UTC. Unless you have many questions, we will follow our usual agenda, of giving updates on the upcoming plans and recent activities, having plenty of time and space for your questions, and building a Function together. The meeting will in Google Meet.
Recording of Mahir's WikiConference North America presentation
This year's WikiConference North America was 16-19 October 2025 in New York City. Community member Mahir Morshed presented the session How Different Languages Contribute to Abstract Wikipedia Content's Potential. A recording of the session is now available on YouTube. Thanks to Mahir for hosting the session, and thanks to the WikiConference organizers for organizing WikiCon NA!
And a special thanks to the very special heroes of the event.
Fresh Functions weekly: 15 new Functions
This week we had 15 new functions. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing!
- absolute numerator when scaled to denominator (Z29023)
- integer numerator when scaled to denominator (Z29028)
- search phrase from JSON (Z29031)
- HTML fragment contains (Z29045)
- right float (Z29052)
- German noun declination table floating right (Z29055)
- string of first listed Wikidata item statement (Z29059)
- quoted object from object (helper) (Z29079)
A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created is available.
No comments:
Post a Comment