[Abstract-wikipedia] Newsletter #235: Finishing each other sentences: Starting things; Offsite in Istanbul

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here:

https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2026-02-13

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Team offsite in Istanbul

From left to right, back row: James Forrester, Daphne Smit, Laura Morgantini; middle row: Zaree Singer, Grace Choi, Joydeep Sengupta, Cory Massaro, Denny Vrandečić, David Santamaria; front row: Luca Martinelli, David Martin, Genoveva Galarza Heredero.

Merhaba! Last week, the Abstract Wikipedia team was at our annual offsite in Istanbul, Turkey. Since the team is a fully remote team, such offsites offer the opportunity to get to know colleagues sometimes for the first time in person, and to reconnect with team members.

Istanbul was an amazing place to visit. We met with local community members, made the acquaintance of many cats, visited marvelous monuments, and enjoyed amazing food.

Besides working on our plans for the upcoming financial year, we also had the opportunity to get to know related teams, such as the new Wikidata Platform infrastructure team, and the Language and Product Localisation team. It was great to meet them and learn more about each other.

We also had two very practical sessions, one about creating functions that we are writing about below, and the other about using the Abstract Wikipedia prototype, which we will discuss next week.

Finishing each other's sentences: Starting things

At the team-offsite, we worked together with some other teams on creating a sentence fragment for "a thing is starting / something begins". We identified that this very simple fragment is used on many list articles for entries about events, and so will be vital for early pages on Abstract Wikipedia. The fragment creation Function only takes a single argument for the content, a Wikidata Item Reference for what is starting – and the natural language the fragment is to be written in. It returns a monolingual text with the result.

First, we created a default renderer which simply takes the label of the item in the requested language and prepends a flying rocket emoji. So if you ask for the Ukrainian version of Wikipedia starts, it currently returns "🚀 Вікіпедія".

Then team members worked on creating functions for languages they knew, creating functions in Spanish, English, Swedish, Basque, Bengali, Croatian, Simplified Chinese, Punjabi, German, Italian, and Persian. Since then, a community member User:JhowieNitnek wrote one in Dutch, and in this week's volunteers' corner we added Korean.

In some languages, this task turned out to be much easier than in others: in English and Chinese, a simple concatenation of the label and a bit of hard-coded text is sufficient. In other languages, such as Spanish or Italian, we need to ensure agreement between the subject and the verb (i.e. it makes a difference whether the subject has a male or female grammatical gender). In other languages, such as in the Korean example, we have to get the right case marking on the subject. At the current time, the Functions that enable us to do so easily are often still missing, but our expectation is that such foundational utilities for morphology and grammar will become more comprehensively available in many languages, and so the fifth fragment in a given language will be much easier to write than the first.

Feel free to add more language support! We are curious to see how things develop.

Recording of February Volunteers' Corner

This week's volunteers' corner is available on Commons, and focuses on us building the Korean version of the fragment mentioned above.

Fresh Functions weekly: 40 new Functions

Since the last newsletter, we had 40 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!

A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created is available.

Friday, February 13, 2026