Abstract Wikipedia:Project chat

Abstract Wikipedia Project chat.
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• 2026/03
• 2026/04

Put this on ice

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)

Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean it needs to be shut down. These are all gradual processes. Feeglgeef (talk) 15:58, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

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)

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)

When the practices and policies will have already been developed, and informal positions of authority already filled. Kowal2701 (talk) 17:04, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

@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)

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)

@EatingCarBatteries We will enable the Translate extension soon, so everyone will be able to translate project pages into their own languages. Sorry for keeping you waiting on this. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 10:41, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

@Kowal2701: thank you for your concern and suggestion. When this Beta started, we have immediately mentioned that there might be the possibility of restarting the project. So that might indeed happen.

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)

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)

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)

Abstract Wikipedia:Useful functions for article composition is already available, as is Help:How to create an article, but they are not perfect. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:05, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata has a project chat in many languages. We can do that in the future. Immanuelle (talk) 14:28, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Anyone can write on this page in any language. Personally, I’d prefer to see the original and get it translated into English rather than trying to make sense of a poor machine translation without even knowing which language the original was in. For the same reason, I would generally reply in English. GrounderUK (talk) 23:18, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Why don't we just structure this with wikitemplates?

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)

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)

How do you do parsoid rendering? And why wouldn't it make sense? With aliases and everything could work great. Immanuelle (talk) 23:12, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

I believe it is enabled by default. If you do have it on: you'll see this Feeglgeef (talk) 14:54, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

you may be interested in reading this old Google report. BrokenSegue (talk) 14:32, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

Automatically querying wikidata

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)

Yes, that is the long term goal. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:37, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

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)

I had exactly this question. One of the example here is Q1033 where I read "Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa.". The problem is that this concept is hard-coded. What if its population will decrease and it will become the second-most populous country? Wiso (talk) 08:21, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Logo

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T424781

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)

There's also the scalable favicon, Abstract-Wikipedia-favicon.svg Arlo Barnes (talk) 01:54, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

This still appears to be as of yet unfixed. I understand this wiki is still very early in its lifespan so I'm not particularly miffed about it, it looking identical due to the logo is rather confusing at first but with separation with tab groups in my browser it becomes manageable. I am personally excited to see what logo(s) will be devised for this project; seeing the same thing happen for the other sister projects has been very fun to watch in the past. — rae^5e <talk> 21:49, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

I made a desktop app that helps with editing

now there's a screenshot available

I made a desktop app that helps with creating and editing Abstract Wikipedia pages. It pulls data from wikidata to form templates that it makes into wikitext, and it can round-trip articles into and from the wikitext. Here it is User:Immanuelle/Abstract Wikipedia Editor. I hope that it helps with editing. — Immanuelle (talk) 00:51, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I've created Abstract Wikipedia:Tools for tracking these things. Feeglgeef (talk) 14:44, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

@Immanuelle But the main namespace is not for wikitext. Are you publishing this content there anyway? ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 15:05, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

It's not actual wikitext. It's a custom template syntax that's kind of like wikitext, which gets converted into abstract content when you press "Push to Abstract Wikipedia." JJP_Master (she/they) 16:57, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

@Ainali@JJPMaster if you have syntax suggestions I am interested. I was in a rush with implementing this, and I want to in the future implement aliases for wikifunctions and possibly items, so that you can type things out yourself. Immanuelle (talk) 19:53, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Ah, I see. IT was just the announcement that was ambiguous then. ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 20:03, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

FYI anything made by a clanker AI robot is not "made by you." Thank you for your attention to this matter. Feeglgeef (talk) 15:18, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Who, then? Arlo Barnes (talk) 20:16, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

The clanker AI robot. Babelball (talk) 16:42, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

I edited the Wikidata page for the tool to mention Claude. Arlo Barnes (talk) 21:35, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

FYI that LLM-generated code is not eligible for copyright, and therefore the MIT license by extension. Feeglgeef (talk) 17:59, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I think the statements that Wikidata could make are limited by what references can be found. This help page makes it sound as if there are limited options for expressing a repo's licensing situation, so I am not surprised that MIT should be the blanket release, even if strictly speaking some of the code contained within is ineligible for copyright, or infringes on an existing copyright (which would need to be demonstrated). But I suppose turnabout is fair play? — Arlo Barnes (talk) 19:53, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

@Arlo Barnes I like the idea of the wikidata content being restricted based on sources provided. I will try to implement something like this in the next release. Any ideas of which particular statements are useful and should be imported more readily? Immanuelle (talk) 20:28, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I meant in the Wikidata item for AWE, but in general I think our articles should incorporate references early on, since even abstract content needs justification. This help page may be handy; 'statement supported by' could be useful for linking to biographical articles in the manner "According to [source], [claim]" (obviously adjusted to the relevant language structures in each language for saying such things). — Arlo Barnes (talk) 20:42, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

@Arlo Barnes oh that makes sense. But as for the wikidata sources, actually providing the sources is something that is trivially easy as far as accessing wikidata is concerned, but I am not sure how to give sources for claims in wikilambdas. Do you know how? Immanuelle (talk) 20:44, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't. Currently the distinction between content and format is unclear to me. Arlo Barnes (talk) 21:48, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

@Arlo Barnes what do you mean by content vs format? Immanuelle (talk) 21:52, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

In the most 'abstract' sense, an article would have as irreducible parts semantic content only (from Wikidata), with syntax handled by the group of functions responsible for getting things looking right in a given target language. In practice, the overall structuring of the article largely defines or limits the syntactic structures of language produced. This is sensible for an encyclopedia which has a fairly conventional or constrained sort of prose. Of course, a web encyclopedia needs more than prose. Hence the functions for making links and formatting text (right now directly to HTML, bypassing wikitext). Although this is a MediaWiki installation, no article has had media content added to it yet, since the formatting functions that would enable that aren't in place. So I would say that content and formatting are entangled, currently. A reference could be considered either: the text that provides the sourcing of a statement, or the formatting that enables this semantic content to read as a reference, perhaps inline or as a footnote, end note, or marginal note. f:WF:type proposals#Representing abstract content has a couple RfCs about this. — Arlo Barnes (talk) 01:45, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Yeah I am very confused about what the intention of Abstract Wikipedia is and how much it lines up with the reality. I had thought that the articles would be mostly directly generated from wikidata.

Only particular direction I see clearly is that I think we need articles on all of these pages d:Wikidata:List of articles that Abstract Wikipedia should have since they will likely bring a lot of traffic to the site and since they have a lot of information, people will have a lot of reason to come to this site and come up with new ways of expressing things on the pages. Immanuelle (talk) 04:06, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I am however really liking section headers like the one here Q12539 and I am going to include them in the next release Immanuelle (talk) 04:13, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Yes I think that adding sections to articles might be really the first part of the journey towards actually having somewhat readable articles. Although a lot of this is dependent on the article text actually rendering at all Immanuelle (talk) 04:21, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Yeah I think I am getting the hang of things. Adding sections and paragraph breaks to the new versions. Denoted by

{{p}}

for a paragraph break

and

==QID==

for a subheading

All content is now generated within paragraphs, and the {{p}} splits the paragraphs up. Feeglgeef mentioned that the paragraphs are a significant accessibility feature, and the paragraphs are also easier to insert with the methods of the app. Immanuelle (talk) 04:36, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I am also implementing "it" to avoid repeating the name of the article constantly, and I am implementing citation preservation on certain things.Meanwhile also trying to fix the accessibility issue that was criticized. Immanuelle (talk) 05:25, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

New release is out Immanuelle (talk) 07:42, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I would suggest not to use d:Q6091500 at the moment. In some languages, there might be multiple words for different uses of "it". If you are editing with only the English logic, it won't help build a multilingual wiki. Sun8908 (talk) 17:42, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

@Sun8908 fair. I had thought it would be dropped in pro-drop languages but I do not think that was a reasonable assumption. Immanuelle (talk) 19:47, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I asked at the Monday meeting. Not sure if anything is being done about it though. Immanuelle (talk) 20:15, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Nice work. I for one don't care how you made the tool, the important part to me is how it works and if it helps me/us edit AW. So9q (talk) 20:23, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Article on wheat

@Immanuelle: your tool is back at it again! I've asked you to test it before you use it to create a bunch of articles twice now. You, evidently, haven't listened! I understand you're probably acting in good faith, but you have to test your tool before you unleash it on the wiki. Feeglgeef (talk) 01:38, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

No, I did listen. I am not sure what your objection is, but this looks like intended behaviour. I was asked to make every single sentence into its own paragraph to make it easier to debug maintaining accessibility. Previous the tool grouped many sentences into a single paragraph. Immanuelle (talk) 02:49, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

@Immanuelle: You were asked to make each actual paragraph into a call of the "paragraph" function. You were not asked to make every individual sentence a paragraph. That is probably even less accessible than what we started with. JJP_Master (she/they) 03:06, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

The content itself needs refining. As it is, most articles have no value-added over the Wikidata triples plus labels; basically just slight readability improvements. We require complex structures sooner rather than later. Arlo Barnes (talk) 03:08, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

I thought that the rule was that we put every single sentence into a paragraph of its own because text readers need a paragraph to read the text. We cannot debug things if there are multiple sentences within a paragraph, because these sentences go up to the top and make it so that the paragraph itself fails to render.

So this was specifically an accessibility concern for people who are visually impaired, with an accepted reduction in readability for people with regular vision so that it can also be debugged.

Like this:

"What we might try is wrapping each sentence as a paragraph, with occasional pairing of closely related sentences. That keeps failure isolated while preserving at least some natural flow.

We could consider also implementing a “sentence” or “content unit” function that simply calls “paragraph”, so we can later tell where the intended paragraphs are." Immanuelle (talk) 04:11, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

We need to import the quote template Immanuelle (talk) 04:12, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

Does anybody want any other changes to be made to this tool? Things are still relatively up in the air about what an optimum article even is, and as a result it kind of makes us limited in what we can do with it. I'm changing the way that the paragraphs work to fit what I now perceive as the consensus. Immanuelle (talk) 18:11, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

I tried to run it on macOS 14.5, but it errored out when I clicked "Pull from Wikidata." It appears that this was because you hardcoded your Python path.

Error: Error invoking remote method 'generate-wikitext': Error: spawn C:/Users/Immanuelle/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python313/python.exe ENOENT — JJP_Master (she/they) 11:56, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

For the record, the solution is to go into src/main.ts and change the Python path to something other than C:/Users/Immanuelle/... — JJP_Master (she/they) 12:05, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

TYSM!! I did have to debug the code a little first to get it working, but this will be so helpful for me. — ChaoticVermillion (converse, contribs) 11:59, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I am so sorry and I fixed it so the new release should avoid that problem in the future. — Immanuelle (talk) 17:55, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

@ChaoticVermillion btw there is an update that has a lot more functions and I am not sure if you are using it. The new one allows you to undo edits or restore revisions. Something that I cannot figure out how to do in regular Abstract Wikipedia. Immanuelle (talk) 17:55, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikiprojects

Are there wiki projects here? Can I just make some in this namespace? Immanuelle (talk) 15:12, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't see why not. It's a wiki, after all :). Please just don't flood the talkspace with templates that don't exist. Feeglgeef (talk) 16:51, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I've created a first Wikiproject (Abstract Wikipedia:WikiProject Core articles) and an explainer page (Abstract Wikipedia:WikiProject). Feeglgeef (talk) 17:11, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I made this one too Abstract Wikipedia:WikiProject Quality Prose Immanuelle (talk) 18:39, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef: Are WikiProjects for specific languages OK? Responsibility seems to be stretched between maintaining Wikidata labels and lexemes alongside creating and maintaining functions on Wikifunctions, so I'm unsure if Abstract Wikipedia would be considered a good place to coordinate these things. — rae^5e <talk> 21:56, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

There's no community consensus for or against, so, since this is a wiki, I don't see any reason why anyone would stop you :). Feeglgeef (talk) 23:46, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Numerous errors have been introduced, possibly due to the "AWE" tool

As Fram has pointed out over on the English Wikipedia in his usual style, User:Immanuelle has been breaking pages such as Q711 with edits such as Special:Diff/4383. I was able to fix this by changing "it" to Wikidata item reference in "defining role sentence". @Immanuelle: Judging by your edit history, you have introduced this error to a lot of pages. Before continuing with your work to make the rest of the articles from your list, d:Wikidata:List of articles that Abstract Wikipedia should have, I kindly ask you to fix the pages you've already made. Warudo (talk) 17:16, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

This is, of course, what happens when you use a slop-machine to write code. See existing discussion on User talk:Immanuelle/Abstract Wikipedia Editor#Creates inaccessible content. Feeglgeef (talk) 17:19, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef I thought you wanted everything nested in the paragraph things. That's why I did that, following your request that you linked to. Immanuelle (talk) 17:45, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I know. In the future, can you test whatever the slop-machine gives you on-wiki to ensure you don't mass-vandalize it again? Thank you! Feeglgeef (talk) 17:52, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef the problem I faced is that I do not know how to actually understand error messages on this wiki. When every page fails to render, it is very difficult to know if I introduced an error, or the program introduced an error. Immanuelle (talk) 18:18, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Warudo I guess my question for you would be how did you figure out that this was an error on the page? Immanuelle (talk) 18:19, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

That's a fair question. The way things are now you can't be sure if the error is because of technical issues with the site or a bad page. In this case it was rather easy though. The "dependency" parameter of f:Z28016 expects a reference to a Wikidata item but you passed the string "it" to it. That is an obvious mistake so it was easy to tell that it's not a random error. Warudo (talk) 19:23, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

That makes sense. I will try to be a lot more careful with error detection in the future. Hopefully the technical issues with the site are fixed and I can see the content issues more soon Immanuelle (talk) 20:08, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I suggest that “vandalize” is an inappropriate choice of word in this case. Whatever your feelings about the quality of the code or the care with which it is being deployed, I think you could manage to assume good faith on the part of a fellow contributor. Thank you.

At a technical level, there is an issue with simply bracketing multiple calls together to yield a paragraph, since a failure in any one call will lead to the loss of the whole paragraph. In f:Wikifunctions:Status updates/2026-03-26, the advice given was:

“By the way, here’s one tip: currently, caching for Abstract Wikipedia happens on the level of the “fragment”. This means that by putting several sentences into a single paragraph, the paragraph as a whole is being run, may cause time-outs, and will be cached. Instead, if, for now, you put one sentence into each fragment, caching and evaluation can be more spread out and should allow for more content.”

GrounderUK (talk) 19:00, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@GrounderUK would you suggest removing the paragraph by default behavior in the editor over this? Immanuelle (talk) 19:50, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

What we might try is wrapping each sentence as a paragraph, with occasional pairing of closely related sentences. That keeps failure isolated while preserving at least some natural flow.

We could consider also implementing a “sentence” or “content unit” function that simply calls “paragraph”, so we can later tell where the intended paragraphs are. GrounderUK (talk) 21:23, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

This is not accessible for users with screen-readers, and thus not a viable work-around. Each paragraph must be in a paragraph tag. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:31, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

It’s sub-optimal, I agree, but every unit of meaning would be wrapped in p tags, which is more accessible than a series of bare fragments or failed function calls. GrounderUK (talk) 17:07, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

If you do need to make inaccessible articles, please at least give them a category on the talk page. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:21, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

We’d need to agree an accessibility standard first, but I’m not planning on creating any articles until there are suitable functions available. GrounderUK (talk) 22:36, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree. Accessibility standards need to be established and not just assumed. Immanuelle (talk) 23:28, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I definitely do agree that we need accessibility standards, but this isn't really a nice-to-have that you debate about but rather the floor. Feeglgeef (talk) 00:27, 12 April 2026 (UTC)

I took this thread as consensus that we need to have every sentence as its own paragraph. Is that incorrect? Do people want me to change it back to one paragraph per paragraph break? I removed that one because it covered up errors. Immanuelle (talk) 04:21, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

When someone "vandalizes" it is not necessarily intentional, see wikt:vandalise. I do understand that Immanuelle has good faith, but at the same time, the "deployment" caused tens of articles to be broken, and furthermore I don't suspect something this bad would have slipped through had a human carefully reviewed the code. When a contributor deploys a semi-automated tool and uses it to make edits at the rate @Immanuelle: was at this rate, you are morally obligated to test it. This wasn't the first time the slop-machine that they used caused them to mess up tens of articles, and if Immanuelle doesn't exercise extreme care in the future, I don't suspect it will be the last. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:25, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

It was a silent error that was only discovered by chance. What kind of testing would you have done to avoid this? Immanuelle (talk) 22:37, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef": On Wikipedia, "Vandalism" is a technical term that means "editing (or other behavior) deliberately intended to obstruct or defeat the project's purpose". Accidental disruptive editing is not considered vandalism. Warudo (talk) 22:52, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Warudo on the topic of this glitch. I think I have removed it from all pages that had it. Please tell me if there are more that you see. Immanuelle (talk) 23:29, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for cleaning up :) So9q (talk) 20:29, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

This isn't the English Wikipedia, or even a wikipedia at all, despite the domain. Unless a defined technical term related to Wikifunctions I'd consider words to have their natural language meaning. Feeglgeef (talk) 01:28, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef: Last time I checked, this was the Abstract Wikipedia. But in any case, this is the definition provided in Wikifunctions as well as meta. Vandalism has to be deliberate. Warudo (talk) 08:50, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

It's not the Abstract Wikipedia like the English Wikipedia, but just Abstract Wikipedia. It isn't a Wikipedia in and of itself (as in, it's not supposed to be viewed by end readers), but rather a tool for Wikipedias. Feeglgeef (talk) 15:33, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

It still has an independent editing community. Just because it draws from Wikidata and Wikifunctions doesn't mean content decisions aren't made here; it necessarily has to have some autonomy just like any language edition. Arlo Barnes (talk) 19:18, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

“Deliberately” is also the first word of section 3.3 of our Code of Conduct, linked at the foot of every page. GrounderUK (talk) 17:11, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

+1 Please assume good faith and keep it civil. So9q (talk) 20:27, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

@Warudo will hold off on page creation Immanuelle (talk) 17:43, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Just a note @Immanuelle, the project is a Beta version, so, in my opinion, it's not a good idea to flood it with a large number of article stubs. Additionally, the natural language functions are still limited.--Mdktb (talk) 18:58, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Mdktb okay that is a good point. I think I was confused since I thought that we were more on the trying to get new users stage. I will stick to fixing up my errors and only making pages on things that I have a lot of stuff to say on. Immanuelle (talk) 19:20, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

@Mdktb and here is a wikiproject I made and tagged some pages with that is specifically related to developing more natural language Abstract Wikipedia:WikiProject Quality Prose Immanuelle (talk) 19:27, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Would you be willing to raise this in the project chat? I'm thinking we are in an experimentation state that will keep improving incrementally just like the first edition of Wikipedia did since January 15, 2001. Just like back then I don't think it's a good idea to arbitrarily limit good faith editing. We probably will have to revisit these articles later as more and better functions become available but that in itself is not a valid argument for refraining from edits. So9q (talk) 20:36, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Already here ;) Feeglgeef (talk) 21:05, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree with your stub-flooding comment, I don't think it's particularly useful to have a bunch of articles that say nothing. The concern right now should be testing. I expect that the way in which we write abstract articles will change drastically eventually, so writing hundreds of articles is not only a waste of time but a debt. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:07, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

We can always use Special:AncientPages to find them later on.

My expectation is that things will change, but we’ll be able to change the articles. They aren’t set in stone. Immanuelle (talk) 03:21, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

The error in question was that "it" ended up getting into the jsons as a string instead of the id for "it". This occurred due to an error with the program with function aliasing, functions and items can have aliases that are used to be human readable, and replaced with their codes during insertion. But apparently when you try to insert a nonexistent alias then it just inserts the text and there is no server side validation at all of edits.

My guess is that basically they do not have an api since they have no server side validation and were relying on solely client side, and did not anticipate someone building such a tool that accidentally bypassed client side validation through a cache injection which was motivated by UX purposes

I plan on attending the Monday volunteer meeting and asking about this issue. Immanuelle (talk) 22:45, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

> But apparently when you try to insert a nonexistent alias then it just inserts the text and there is no server side validation at all of edits.

This sounds like a bug. Would you be willing to create a ticket in phab with details? So9q (talk) 20:38, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

The team has already declined (or indicated that they had no plans) to do validation in this form, so I don't think a new ticket would be ideal. Either way, this shouldn't affect anyone besides those using a headless browser (or anyone using good, human-reviewed code and a headless browser), so I don't think it would be a priority anyway. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:19, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Not sure what you are talking about. At the meeting they did not seem to be opposed to doing server side validation. They just said that they had a bit of concerns about infrastructure that was stopping it as an immediate thing. Immanuelle (talk) 20:14, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

The volunteer's corner? I unfortunately missed that, but it was more than a year ago that I believe they decided not to pursue it, so you're probably right. Feeglgeef (talk) 13:46, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

So I have resolved this issue, as I have resolved most of the issues that people brought up. The whole paragraph debate is something I am returning to the older version of. Does anybody want other changes to the way that it makes articles? Immanuelle (talk) 18:09, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

REST API for editing?

Hi, does anyone know if there is a ticket in phab for a public API endpoint that allows editing of AW content? It would be very useful to improve tooling and content. So9q (talk) 20:41, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't believe so. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:03, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I do not know why there isn't a REST API, but I had to specifically work around it with my editing tool. It will be very nice in the future to have a REST API.

I think that right now there isn't actually any server-side verification of whether an article is well-structured, and that might be the reason why there isn't a REST API yet. Immanuelle (talk) 23:46, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

What rest api are you talking about? Checkout Special:RestSandbox. Tanbiruzzaman (talk) 16:50, 12 April 2026 (UTC)

I would like to proudly announce that it can be done. See Special:Diff/6102. Here was my request:

{
  "source": "{\"qid\":\"Q100000\",\"sections\":{\"Q8776414\":{\"index\":0,\"fragments\":[\"Z89\"]}}}",
  "title": "Q100000",
  "comment": "Hello from MediaWiki REST API",
  "content_model": "abstractwiki",
  "token": "[token]"
}

JJP_Master (she/they) 04:43, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Spaces between sentences

In abstract articles with two sentences or more, I usually see two spaces between the sentences. Why two? I usually write one space, and that's probably what most people do in English. I know that some people write two; I don't like it myself, but this practice does exist. But here, it raises a few more nuanced questions:

1. Where is it actually defined that there are supposed to be any spaces between the sentences? I might be wrong, but it probably comes from the extension code and not from the functions.
2. Can this be customized per language? I don't know all the rules for all the languages, but I strongly suspect that some languages use spaces between sentences differently, and no default is good for all the languages. I'd especially check if it's good for Thai, Burmese, Japanese, and Chinese.
3. When I examine the HTML code of the rendered sentences, each of them is a <div>. It's a bit odd—I'd expect <span> there.

Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:07, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

Can you give an example article, please? Feeglgeef (talk) 14:01, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Q833, Q11361384, and probably every other abstract article whose rendered English text has more than sentence. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:34, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

No, not every single one (see Q333), but most of them. This has happened because Denny promoted separating sentences into individual fragments and Immanuel used an AI slop-machine to create an editing tool. Essentially, they're being treated as separate elements (like how one paragraph is different from a section heading), so the UI adds a space. This, of course, should not be done, because it breaks screen-readers and looks weird, but apparently everyone is just OK with it. Like a thousand articles have been created by the afforementioned slop-generated tool (because the person who oversaw the bot that created it seems to care more about quantity than quality), whereas I've only created three myself (because I care more about quality and shaping the direction of the wiki in preparation for when abstract content becomes actually viable). Feeglgeef (talk) 15:02, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, Q333 has one fragment, which is one function call, which in turn creates two sentences and joins them using a hardcoded space. If each sentence was created using a separate fragment, they would probably appear with two spaces in practice. Neither option is very good.

The mass creation of abstract articles using that tool is probably not really related to this. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 15:52, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

No, one of them is objectively wrong and one of them is correct. You're not supposed to split two sentences into two fragments. That's the point. The mass creation of articles using that tool is related, because it's responsible for the proliferation of articles that follow the wrong one. Feeglgeef (talk) 17:36, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Why not split sentences into fragments? I can easily imagine some functions that produce several sentences, but it's not universal.

And why is it correct to join sentences using a hardcoded space? Joining sentences shouldn't be done using a hardcoded space, but with a generic "join sentences" function, which will be one space for many languages, but probably not for all of them. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 17:55, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Yes, not having to hardcode is the eventual goal. Splitting sentences into fragments is bad because it adds extra spacing (this is a feature, and a good one!), because it's bad for screen-readers, and because it would be impossible to distinguish between paragraphs, the article would just be a collection of sentences. Feeglgeef (talk) 18:03, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

I still don't understand why splitting into fragments is bad. What is good about extra spacing? It looks like a bad feature, not a good one. It sounds like a rendering and presentation issue, not a logical issue. Fragments can be inline, and the inline ones should be <span>s, not <div>s. And there should also be an option for <div> fragments. And maybe some others. Forcing every fragment to be a <div> sounds like a bad feature. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 18:46, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Again, the spacing is good because the correct reason to split is to create two separate paragraphs. Even if the spacing was removed, it would still not work for screen-readers, and blocking out blind people when the mission is to spread knowledge to neglected languages is incredibly ironic. I'm not sure how else I'm supposed to communicate this to you. It's like asking "why is magma so hot! I want to drink magma instead of water, but it's too hot and not refreshing!" Feeglgeef (talk) 19:07, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Maybe I understand what a "fragment" is supposed to be differently. Where is defined what is it supposed to be? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 20:22, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Archiving discussions on this page?

We're soon coming up to having a month old messages here, and considering the current length of it and size of the community, perhaps 30 days is a good limit for archiving them. Does anyone know how to get an archive bot running here? ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 06:44, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

+1 So9q (talk) 09:55, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

+1 Feeglgeef (talk) 13:41, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

+1. I think SpBot does archiving on Wikifunctions. Maybe it could be brought here as well? ChaoticVermillion (converse, contribs) 14:18, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

+1 Immanuelle (talk) 14:24, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Importing the q template

I really want the {{q}} template here imported from wikidata. It is very helpful with qids. Linking to here instead of wikidata. Might be able to be expanded for lexemes and wikifunctions too. Immanuelle (talk) 14:26, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

I've copied it and its dependencies from Wikifunctions: see universe (Q1) It may need some tweaking to work well here, because we also use QIDs. --99of9 (talk) 04:51, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

Great! I think we need Template:Quote too Immanuelle (talk) 04:13, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

Caching issues (hopefully) fixed

Hey all, I know the caching issues have been a real pain for you. I've just now deployed what (I hope) is a fix that works for calls on Wikifunctions.org, fragments here, and embedded Wikifunctions calls. See for example view/en/Q1344227 which should load fragments near-immediately for you (not need a retry or time out). You'll also see e.g. that https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikifunctions now has "stable" results, not just endless "please wait" comments. That said, please tell me where I'm wrong and you're having issues! Much better to hear now than assume it's fixed and start all over again tomorrow.

I appreciate your feedback and patience over this; it has been very generous of you all. Our next work in this area is to make the cache much more scalable and resilient over time, so it's faster and more reliable for you, and cheaper for us to support. Thank you again. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Thank you (and the rest of the team) for your efforts for this new wiki! We really appreciate it. Feeglgeef (talk) 14:58, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Wow this is great! Now we can do a lot more verification on whether created pages are working well! Gotta look over a bunch of pages. Immanuelle (talk) 15:20, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Yes I tried to fix up a bunch of pages. Many of them actually render properly now. But I did need to change quite a few Immanuelle (talk) 17:36, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Yes, please give your attention to the quality of pages you've already created rather than expanding the quantity. For example, on Q153 I notice that you used Z28016 a lot, but that "defining" should only be used when it is the only instance of that class in that location (which works fine for a capital city), but not e.g. for hydrogen being "the" part of ethanol. --99of9 (talk) 04:43, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

Importing templates from wikipedias

I think it would be a good idea to set something up so that templates from wikipedia can be represented as wikifunctions. Immanuelle (talk) 14:59, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Already Done on WF, see f:WF:MediaWiki parser functions. Feeglgeef (talk) 15:08, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Idea for the project chat

I've been thinking of some ideas that we could implement related to the project chat. I'm not saying I endorse anything, just throwing out an idea.

There's been a lot of activity on here, I'm not sure if this is going to be a permanent thing or if it's just because the wiki just started. If it maintains its activity, we might want to divide it up like the English Wikipedia does, perhaps into "Proposals", "Technical and Wikifunctions", and "Miscellaneous." Feeglgeef (talk) 15:19, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Simple english wikipedia has almost all discussion happen on its Project chat. I think we should only add nerw things once we really need more chats. Having everything here makes it easier for people to keep up with the news of abstract wikipedia. Immanuelle (talk) 16:31, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

The place to keep up with news for "abstract [sic] wikipedia [sic]" is the newsletter. I think that separating might actually make it easier to follow the specific discussion that you want, as you can choose which of the three to subscribe to. Feeglgeef (talk) 17:58, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

We should at least have a talk page archiving bot, like en:User:lowercase sigmabot III. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 20:18, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

What to do with Z26955

There are a lot of articles with Z26955 in them, since it has this obvious warning on it, what should we do with existing articles that have it? Just remove it on sight? Immanuelle (talk) 15:33, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

We should only improve articles by fixing the problems, not by removing them. If you can replace a function by a better one, that’s great. Otherwise, please leave it for now so that we can see what needs fixing. GrounderUK (talk) 23:04, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Representing "part of"

How do I represent that something is part of another thing? I used to use the spo sentence without understanding that it did not work. Immanuelle (talk) 16:30, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

I think f:Z32982 can be used, with the role as d:Q1310239. ChaoticVermillion (converse, contribs) 18:55, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

See Q307, perhaps

https://abstract.wikipedia.org/view/en/Q307

Middle finger of Galileo's right hand is the part of of Galileo Galilei. ~2026-25174-74 (talk) 03:07, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #244 is out: Milestones; Some major issues hopefully resolved

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we celebrate 4000 functions on Wikifunctions and 1000 abstract articles on Abstract Wikipedia, we announce that we should have fixed some major issues with the websites, we inform you on our latest outreach activities, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 10:22, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

AceWiki: Abstract Wikipedia before Abstract Wikipedia?

For those of you not in the know, ACE is Attempto Controlled English. This is a special subset of English that, unlike regular English, is entirely grammatically unambiguous and is machine-readable. For example, the sentence "Every person has a cat" is ACE, as a computer could easily parse that into a logical structure of the form "for any person P, P has a cat." Well, I found a semantic wiki software called AceWiki, whose articles are written entirely in Attempto Controlled English (see AceWikiGEO). The sentence structures seen in AceWiki articles (while I can't link directly to any article, the article on the United States of America, which can be found in the Index in the sidebar, is a good example) are quite similar to those in our existing abstract articles. Using a tool called ACE-in-GF, ACE text could be translated into any language.

I've been thinking about the idea of a tool that allows an editor to write Attempto Controlled English text, and have that text turned into an abstract article. As an example:

ACE -- "Every antelope is a mammal." → Abstract content -- Classifying a class of nouns (Z26627): antelope (Q25894), mammal (Q7377)

This tool would not be optimized for mass article creation, since it would not include an option to generate articles directly from Wikidata, but I think it could be interesting to see how being able to write abstract articles in natural language might lower the barrier to contributing to this project. Thoughts? JJP_Master (she/they) 01:59, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure how we'd actually do the conversion step. If you'd be willing to attempt to make a prototype I'd love to look at it, but I'm skeptical. Feeglgeef (talk) 18:12, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

Help with the news section on main page

Hi all, I would like to have some help in importing f:Template:Main page/News here and inserting it in the main page's module. Can someone help me to do it? Sannita (WMF) (talk) 10:26, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

I believe Template:Main page/News is already set up and visible on the main page, unless you mean importing the history of the WF template over. Tenshi! (Talk page) 11:12, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Ah, that's great, thanks! Sannita (WMF) (talk) 14:53, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Layout guidelines?

One thing I'm noticing is that there are a lot of ways to do the same thing. I'd like to know which is preferred in the simple case of making single-sentence articles that just say what they are.

Take Q503 for example. If you look at the edit history of the article, you'll see it went through a few changes:

• Initially, it was a string of monolingual text call wrapped inside of a string to HTML fragment call. The innermost function got the monolingual text returned from subject is kind of, converted it to a string, and then to a HTML fragment.
• Afterwards the two topmost functions were removed until only the subject is kind of function call remained, and this was wrapped in a call to monolingual text as HTML with visible language tag.
• Finally the subject is kind of call was placed into a typed list provided as an argument to the join text-like objects into HTML fragment call, which in turn was made into a proper paragraph rather than a standalone <div> as it was previously.

None of these seem like a particularly bad way to approach things, and I have seem all of them in the wild; the first thing I tried I did so as it was the way the first article I stumbled upon chose to render its text.

Since Abstract Wikipedia:Useful functions for article composition only goes over linguistic functions, and doesn't seem to provide any guidance on composition functions (i.e. building the HTML contents itself, as you have to do in the plain visual editor online), I thought I'd ask here if there is a preferred way to do things, and if it could perhaps be made clearer on the website if so. It is rather bothersome wanting to build e.g. a wikitable, and needing to peruse the available functions on Wikifunctions instead of having an easily-accessible way to see what is generally recommended for the particular circumstance. — rae^5e <talk> 21:36, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm partial to paragraph(join text-like objects into HTML fragment(your sentences)), as not using a paragraph tag is bad for those who use screen readers, and I designed join text-like objects to reduce function calls and therefore speed up the article processing step. The long-term problem with this method is that Japanese and Chinese both do not have spaces between sentences, so I plan to soon create a function that takes a list of text-like objects and then converts it into a paragraph under the correct style of each language. Feeglgeef (talk) 23:51, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

That sounds good, I have grown more fond of that method as well. What you described would be great to have, I have been adding f:Z13128 references inbetween each sentence to counteract the lack of spacing but something that would do this automatically for English while also obeying the sentence rules of other languages it renders in would be very ideal. — rae^5e <talk> 16:33, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef: I noticed f:Z33068. I decided to hack up an implementation of it that aligns with what you said, I don't know if this is what your original intention for the function was and I apologize if I misconstrued it. At the moment, it just runs the join text-like objects function I mentioned earlier wrapped in a call to paragraph, but adds spaces if the language is not Japanese or Chinese. I'm not sure if, in this scope, a lack of spaces is the only difference between how certain languages arrange their sentences. This also only accounts for the ZObjects for Chinese and Japanese specifically, I think some sort of switch statement or separate configuration object would be better suited for this—not to mention that there are separate natural language objects for the different scripts of Japanese, so those would have to be blanketed under Japanese when considering the language passed in (which I don't want to chain a bunch of ORs to do at the moment). For now, though, it seems to work fine. I added two different test cases and they both pass, and I have also utilized the function on Q241691. — rae^5e <talk> 03:31, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

Ah, thank you for implementing that, it looks good to me. I've created a persistent object for storing the languages that don't use spaces, f:Z33984. Feeglgeef (talk) 13:47, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata problems

Sorry for posting two questions here in a row. I'll try to make this brief.

On the bottom of Q247237 is what should be a list of albums, but on my end it appears as just "PLUS" repeated fourteen times. This seems to occur any time I use f:Z13464 on a list of Wikidata item references... is anyone else seeing this? I'm not sure what I could be doing wrong.

Related to this, I wonder if I can avoid needing to explicitly state each of these items? I moved the list to a separately-defined object on Wikifunctions to avoid having to constantly transfer it between websites since I don't think the clipboard works cross-site. Ordinarily, if I were trying to get all Autechre studio albums, I would use Wikidata's SPARQL query feature to do this, by finding every entity whose P31 is Q482994 and whose P50 is Q247237. This doesn't seem to be doable with Wikifunctions, though, or at least I'm not seeing it... so I don't know how I would do this automatically. We are making articles out of functions here, so I think it would be worthwhile if I tried to future-proof the list using this paradigm. — rae^5e <talk> 16:30, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

On your first question, I've tried to replicate this on WF and I cannot, which makes it difficult to solve.

We cannot currently reverse most WD statements, so your use case is not currently possible, but we are able to access the statements that are on an item. Feeglgeef (talk) 18:10, 21 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm experiencing the issue again on f:Z33997, it seems. Check the test results of the three-item test, "programmer" should not appear twice. I ran into a similar problem earlier in working on the implementation. For the two-item case, using a call to get the nth element of a list on both items (index 1 and 2 respectively) returned the first item twice. I had to use a call to first element to fix it.

Could this be a caching issue, perhaps? That seems likely, because I don't know why else this would be happening. — rae^5e <talk> 16:16, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

I am considering raising this issue on Phabricator if it hasn't been brought up already, this doesn't seem intentional. — rae^5e <talk> 14:48, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

What are we called?

If editors of Wikipedia are Wikipedians, editors of Wiktionary are Wiktionarians, editors of Wikivoyage are Wikivoyagers, and editors of Wikiversity are Wikiversitarians, what are we? Abstract Wikipedians? Abstracters? Abstractions? AWians? JJP_Master (she/they) 11:54, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't like Abstractions and AWians. Abstracters sounds cool, it could be our "informal" term, while Abstract Wikipedians is our "formal" one. We could also apply it based on context (in the mainspace you're an abstracter, in the projectspace you're an abstract wikipedian), I'm not sure, though. Feeglgeef (talk) 13:12, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

I think an -or ending for 'abstractor' sounds cooler, personally. Abstract Wikipedians is boring but is the most straightforward option. — rae^5e <talk> 14:50, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

I did mean to spell it as "Abstractors." Sorry about the typo. JJP_Master (she/they) 18:55, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

Indexed by Google - deliberate?

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aabstract.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F

Exposing Qid to Google looks like a mistake. Not likely to attract the public. Might adversely affect Wikipedia's Page rank or whatever?

~2026-25174-74 (talk) 04:20, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

Indexing may already have stopped, after the 7th April - no recent pages found. ~2026-25174-74 (talk) 04:26, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

I can't edit generated text on pages for some reason?

why is this? Thank you. BigKrow (talk) 07:58, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

You're not supposed to be able to edit generated text. You can edit the code that makes it, though. Feeglgeef (talk) 16:58, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #245 is out: The Foundation's search for the perfect language

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we present an academic paper about Abstract Wikipedia, we discuss our latest Type created, and we take a look at the newest created functions.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:54, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

Why the editing API doesn't work

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T423542

Immanuelle wrongly stated that there is no REST API for editing. There is. However, it does not work when called from software outside Abstract Wikipedia. That is because there is no way to grant a bot password or OAuth customer the permission to edit abstract articles (wikilambda-abstract-edit) and create them (wikilambda-abstract-create), since no grant on Special:ListGrants includes either. Should this be fixed? JJP_Master (she/they) 01:57, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Yes I think the rights should be added. I think the number of automated edits should be low at the moment as Abstract Wikipedia is still in an early phase and so far there is not much support for small languages and so many functions will maybe change to cover more languages. As automatic editing using a Bot Account requires an formal request it is no problem if the option exists. Hogü-456 (talk) 18:17, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Could we add a bot section to Abstract Wikipedia:Requests for permissions? Feeglgeef (talk) 23:35, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Abstract_Wikipedia:Requests_for_permissions#Bot ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:56, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Q884

The page Q884 has inaccurate statements about the head of government and the head of state of South Korea. Part of what it returns in English is "Lee Ju-ho is the head of government of South Korea.Park Geun-hye is the head of state of South Korea." However, neither Lee Ju-ho nor Park Geun-hye currently have their respective roles mentioned here. How should these statements be turned into ones using the past tense? Intolerable situation (talk) 14:44, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

not currently possible :((((( Feeglgeef (talk) 14:46, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Feeglgeef is correct, past tense sentence generation is something we are sorely lacking at the moment. If you look at Wikifunctions' type proposals you can see some initiatives that could hopefully mitigate this. — rae^5e <talk> 13:49, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Abstract Wikipedia should use a different mw-wiki-logo than Wikipedia for Vector 2010 skin

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T424781

Hello friends. I've been asked to start a community conversation about this. I'd like to propose that Abstract Wikipedia create its own logo, so that folks visiting this wiki don't get it mixed up with Wikipedia. Even though this project is under the Wikipedia domain, I think it's pretty unique and it'd make sense to make sure it doesn't get mixed up with enwiki or other Wikipedias by newbies googling for Wikipedia articles. Thoughts? Thanks. Novem Linguae (talk) 12:02, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Isn't there already one? Are we talking about a logo in a different context? Feeglgeef (talk) 12:25, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Looks like this is just for the Vector 2010 skin. Example. I'll edit this section and the ticket to clarify that. Novem Linguae (talk) 12:28, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Ah, thank you, I'd  Support this then. Feeglgeef (talk) 12:31, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

This has been raised before above in #Logo, the same problem appears on Monobook. — rae^5e <talk> 13:45, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Would you support using the Vector 2022 logo on Vector 2010 and Monobook? That'd be a simple technical solution. Novem Linguae (talk) 14:02, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I see no issue with using that for the moment. — rae^5e <talk> 14:04, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

What would it take for AW to catch up to (English) Reasonator? Porting over functions?

The Wikidata tool Reasonator already automatically creates several sentences in English describing human Wikidata items using auto_long_desc.js under a GPL 2.0 free software license without using any large language model or other AI.

Abstract Wikipedia, on the other hand, requires a several step process just to create a lead sentence. Does Resonator have functions in the English section of auto_long_desc.js that Wikifunctions doesn't have at the moment? Is that what's preventing Abstract Wikipedia from auto-generating substantial text (at least in English) based off of Wikidata like Resonator does?

Below is an example of what Resonator can generate from Wikidata without needing human edits the way Abstract Wikipedia does. (Though I omitted some children for the sake of brevity.)

Johann Sebastian Bach was a Saxe-Eisenach-Holy Roman Empire-German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violinist, violist, conductor, choir director, concertmaster, musicologist, music educator, virtuoso, and school teacher.

He was born on March 21, 1685 in Eisenach to Johann Ambrosius Bach and Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt.

He studied at St. Michael's School until April 1702. His field of work included Baroque music and classical music. He was chapelmaster from December 1717 until April 1723 and Thomaskantor from 1723 until 1750. He worked for Collegium Musicum, for Saint Blaise, for Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, for Johann Ernst III, Duke of Saxe-Weimar from January 1703 until August 1703, for Thomasschule zu Leipzig, and for Bachkirche Arnstadt from August 1703 until 1707.

He married Maria Barbara Bach on October 17, 1707 (married until on July 7, 1720 ) and Anna Magdalena Bach on December 3, 1721 (married until on July 28, 1750 ). His children include Catharina Dorothea Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, […]

He died of stroke on July 28, 1750 in Leipzig. He was buried at St. Thomas Church.

Lovelano (talk) 18:41, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Project scope

Might be a stupid question but what articles are/will be allowed on Abstract Wikipedia? How far is it meant to expand? The language Wikipedias have some differing policies, so might not be as simple as copying those. Personally I find the idea of creating an article for any and every Wikidata item really cool and a good baseline for what can have an article, but wouldn't ~120 million abstract articles become unwieldy? If the only requirement is that the article topic has a Wikidata item, then there are many interesting possibilities; one could write about individual dates, Wikidata test items, even Wikimedia disambiguation pages. Have not found where this is explained, if anywhere. This may be up to common sense, but trouble is, couldn't one create an encyclopedically meaningful article on just about anything? Pretty important policy not to have if it's undecided, though is not a problem at the moment. Just wondering. Some helpful person (talk) 23:36, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

This isn't a stupid question and I don't think this is entirely settled. Have you seen Abstract Wikipedia:About? Koavf (talk) 23:57, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Ah, I forgot about that page. So it is meant to abstract information from existing Wikipedia articles? Makes sense, though it still raises the question of creating new articles. Some helpful person (talk) 00:41, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

At this juncture, I don't think anyone has in mind drafting anything new here as such: this is just responding to existing Wikidata items and the possibility of new Wikipedia articles drafted from them, using Wikifunctions. Koavf (talk) 00:51, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't think we ever get any article an existing wiki does not have. Even if abstract content creation gets as fast as reasonably possible, it will never beat out typing text, so we will never catch up with, say, enwiki or eswiki. Feeglgeef (talk) 01:10, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

It's also a question of policy. There are topics about which things could be said, but which wouldn't meet the baseline notability or other criteria of the big monolingual wikis. Arlo Barnes (talk) 20:22, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

This is true, if we keep d:'s notability policy (which seems like the most natural one) then there are many subjects that we theoretically can talk about that don't meet the GNG and similar guidelines. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:25, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

How many articles in how many languages are actually fully available without errors

This is a response to the call in f:Wikifunctions:Status updates/2026-05-02.

The most important thing to count is already listed there: How many articles in how many languages are actually fully available without errors? It should be not just a count, but a list: I want to see which articles are readable in which languages; which articles are readable in some languages, but not others (which ones?); which articles are not readable in any language; etc.

An even more relevant, but much harder to measure thing is how many of those articles are actually more useful than not having an article at all. There is no article about Boston in many languages, but Q100, which currently says "Boston is the capital of Massachusetts.Boston is the largest city of Massachusetts." is not significantly more useful than nothing at all even if it's fully rendered in another language in which there is no concrete article about it. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 12:12, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps this should have been on the talk page of that status update instead of the project chat? Feeglgeef (talk) 18:25, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

The status update is about two projects and so I can understand if there are comments here. What do you think about creating a status update overview page with links to the status updates in Abstract Wikipedia to offer the possibility to discuss the status updates and especially things related to Abstract Wikipedia there. Hogü-456 (talk) 18:57, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't think that's necessary. You can just include your abstractwiki (as in, the live wiki, not the project) related comments on the page on f:, or, if for some reason that's not possible, as a reply to the newsletter announcement here. The point is, the project chat is crowded enough with topics as it is, ideally it should be more focussed on general matters of discussion than close-ended enquiries about topics that have their own talk page. I find Amire80's use of a new == heading here to be improper. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:32, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #246 is out: Request for input: what should we count for Abstract Wikipedia

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we ask you what would be the relevant metrics for Abstract Wikipedia, we discuss our latest news on Composition Language v2, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:21, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Spaces between sentences, another attempt

A month ago, @内存溢出的猫 That discussion doesn't seem to have yielded any fixes or meaningful discussions, at least not that I can see.

Two weeks ago, I tried to bring up a similar topic, but that discussion somehow got derailed and also didn't yield anything useful.

Now, the problem looks differently, but it's still a problem. When I look at Q10251, for example, what I see is four sentences that appear with no spaces between them. Not one, not two—none at all. It looks like this:

Plasma is a fundamental state of matter.Plasma is a classical state of matter.A plasma is a gas.A plasma is a matter.

Note that I emphasized appear: When I see them rendered on the screen, they have no spaces between them. In the HTML, however, they are represented as four <div>s, and their inline positioning is handled by CSS. This means, for example, that if I copy and paste them, I don't get a long string with no spaces after full stops, but four sentences with a single line break after each full stop:

Plasma is a fundamental state of matter.
Plasma is a classical state of matter.
A plasma is a gas.
A plasma is a matter.

This is not how it is supposed to be done. <div>s are supposed to be used for block elements and not hacked into appearing as if they are inline (also known as phrasing). Spaces between sentences are supposed to be real characters rather than HTML and CSS tricks, they may be different in different languages, and in some languages they may be nothing at all.

I hope that the definition of the problem is clear.

Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 12:49, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Hi, have a look at it now. Does this match your expectations? I think it's not rendering right now for whatever reason, but there are other examples of it being done this way that you can see: Q241691. The article renders properly in both English (spaces between sentences) and Japanese (no spaces at all).

English:

Programmed Data Processor is a computer model series by Digital Equipment Corporation. PDP-8 is a Programmed Data Processor.

Japanese:

PDPシリーズはディジタル・イクイップメント・コーポレーションによるコンピュータ・モデル・シリーズである。PDP-8はPDPシリーズである。

I have some, err, strong opinions about Immanuelle's 「Abstract Wikipedia Editor」 tool, which is the predominant cause for all of these very janky and poorly-laid-out articles that you see. This is not how an article ought to be written on Abstract Wikipedia, and I and other editors are aware of this. If you see these problems, please do fix them! The wiki will be all the better for it.

In the absence of consensus on such things as these (and awaiting any official policy pages) I have written f:User:Theki/best practices on my Wikifunctions userpage. You are welcome to read it if you wish. — rae^5e <talk> 17:20, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

The output of Q241691 looks OK to me in this regard. How was it done?

Q10251 gives me an error. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 18:10, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

WikiLambda is doing WikiLambda things. This WASI time limit error happens intermittently on Abstract Wikipedia articles and it usually goes away after a short while. The only thing is that it doesn't really seem like purging these articles does anything to force the orchestrator to retry its evaluation so the article might not render that paragraph until someone comes in and pokes at it by editing it somehow.

The working article uses the paragraph from sentences function to lay out its individual sentence content. This function automatically handles converting any and all text-like objects (strings, HTML fragments, and monolingual text) to a consistent form, so sentence fragments can all be supplied verbatim to its list input. When the function is putting the sentences together it defaults to using a single space to separate them, but first checks if the requested language is in the languages without spaces between sentences list. If it is, it doesn't add spaces at all, and just concatenates the sentences normally. I hope this explanation makes sense. — rae^5e <talk> 18:19, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

It makes some sense, but earlier, you suggested: "If you see these problems, please do fix them", and I'm not entirely sure how to do it. How would I fix it in Q100, for example? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 19:41, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

In this case you would do the following:

1. At the bottom, click the plus and then 「Add empty fragment」.
2. Set the function to f:Z33068, as mentioned earlier.
3. Now go through each sentence fragment, find the innermost sentence-generation function, click on the three dots, and copy it. Do not copy the calls to f:Z29749 or similar, these are not necessary.
4. Go to the paragraph with sentences function call and add an element to the list.
5. Click on the three dots next to the new element, and paste in the earlier sentence fragment.
6. You can now delete the original fragment and repeat the process in the same list for the one after it.

— rae^5e <talk> 19:46, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

@Theki I intend on fixing it, I recently made an attempt but the suggested fixes made problems worse. Do you have any practical suggestions of how to structure the templates? I will try to implement them when I have more time.

Also your name is very confusing, are you in the process of getting it changed wiki-wide? Immanuelle (talk) 22:36, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Um, are you referring to my signature not matching my wiki username? I have considered for a long time changing it from theki, but I don't feel like putting in the effort when it seems to be perfectly ignorable for most people. The user 「Rae」 can't be usurped because they made, like, two or three articles on the Persian Wikipedia two decades ago or something, I don't know. If that weren't the case I would be User:Rae right now but after that failed to go through I just decided to stop bothering. Maybe at some point I'll come up with a username I'm happy with keeping for the foreseeable future but I have other concerns at the moment.

Could you explain how your attempted fixes 「made problems worse」? Presently I side with Feeglgeef's sentiments and prefer to wait for abstract content to actually be feasible to make on a reasonably descriptive scale (see: the type proposals) before I go around making articles willy-nilly, which is what AWE has been doing—making a bunch of pretty low-quality articles on a massive scale when it probably really would have been better to, err, hold off on that.

And I honestly know very little about the actual workings of your editor, I don't really use it nor am I familiar with its template syntax or whatever it may use, so I'm going to look over how it actually works and then get back to you on that. — rae^5e <talk> 23:28, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Using this f:Z33068 made things worse Immanuelle (talk) 00:44, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

That did not go through correctly but I do not think we have a proper thing for it. Immanuelle (talk) 00:45, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

What? Could you elaborate? — rae^5e <talk> 01:00, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

@Immanuelle: I checked. Your issue is that your editor is not providing the article language to Z33068K2; that is, the paragraph from sentences function has a second argument, and your editor was omitting it. If you properly specify it, it will work. Please, next time, actually tell me what went wrong instead of going quiet and forcing me to look after it myself. — rae^5e <talk> 17:06, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Most used fragments

The latest status update lists the most used fragments: "f:Z32123 with 1452, followed by f:Z27868 with 736 and f:Z29749 with 650)".

How was this calculated? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:44, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Again, this should definitely have been on the talk page for that status update. This isn't the everything page, it should be used for discussion relating to the wiki. Feeglgeef (talk) 18:26, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

It's not a question just about the status update, even if it was prompted by it. It's a question about Abstract Wikipedia that can be relevant beyond the status update.

Stop policing how people use discussion pages without a particularly good reason. If you don't have an answer to the actual question, don't write anything. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 19:38, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

I have to agree with Feeglgeef that this would be better raised on the status update's talk page itself. — rae^5e <talk> 19:42, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm "policing" which discussion pages are being used for the same reason different discussion spaces exist in the first place. And your distinction between "just about" and "prompted by" is irrelevant. If I want to ask someone how they did something, I would ask them first, not go to a general discussion board. This is still the project chat, not a Q&A zone. @DVrandecic (WMF), can you please answer the question? Feeglgeef (talk) 22:22, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

I have a local script that I have run on a local copy. Nothing more complicated than that. Could also be very wrong -- the script hasn't been peer-reviewed or anything. --DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 08:54, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, @DVrandecic (WMF). Can you share the code, please? I'll be happy to review it. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 15:30, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Wiktionary integration

I was trying out a few functions recently, such as the new superlative function, and I noticed that every adjective has to be a Wikidata item. For example, I couldn't type in the inputs "Bugatti Veyron", "fast", "Earth" because "fast" as an adjective is not a Wikidata item. This doesn't really make sense, given that Wiktionary already has the word for "fast" and its superlative form in many different languages. Would it be possible to integrate Wiktionary into the function, so the user can type an adjective or verb from Wiktionary instead of having to deal with Wikidata (which consists almost entirely of nouns)? Somepinkdude (talk) 16:49, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

No, sadly. I would try "speed" as the adjective, though, you have to use abstract qualities instead of concrete English terms.

Here's an example of the word being used.

Feeglgeef (talk) 18:02, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata has standard items as well as lexeme data, so if anything, we should try to integrate those. E.g. d:Lexeme:L1029. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:48, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

I tried this, and it gave "Bugatti Veyron is the speedest car on Earth", which is laughably bad. The problem is that Wikidata does not "know" what the superlative form is, while Wiktionary does. Speed is a fairly common descriptor, but what about less common adjectives which aren't on Wikidata? Will there need to be a bot to copy all of this information from Wiktionary? Somepinkdude (talk) 22:14, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting that the functionality works now, but that we need to integrate the funcationality. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:17, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Well, no, the superlative form is chosen by f:Z12203. I think there's a bug with the English implementation that calls that function wrong. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:19, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

@Somepinkdude I did find the item fast (Q19807466) which was linked to a concept database's entry for "fast"; I have at least linked it to the English lexeme "fast" and will try to add more links at a better hour. Mahir256 (talk) 04:18, 7 May 2026 (UTC)

Showcase

I was wondering if there's a curated list of decent articles to learn by example here on Abstract Wikipedia? Fgnievinski (talk) 02:02, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Unfortunately not, and, honestly, I wouldn't recommend article creation at the moment, it's likely to need significant refactoring as the way we represent abstract content changes, but, I can point you to Q668 as a reasonably good example at the moment. Feeglgeef (talk) 02:39, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you. "308 languages" blew my mind – well done! Fgnievinski (talk) 02:54, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

308 is the number of concrete Wikipedias in which a manually-written article about India is available.

The abstract article renders for me in English as "India is a country in Asia. India is a republic. New Delhi is the capital of India. India is the most populous country in world." Switching to another language to get rendered as an abstract article is done by typing the language's name in the box above the rendered text. I tried French, German, and Dutch, and got errors in all of them. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 03:12, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

So it goes. The paragraph has quite a lot of distinct sentence generation functions, all of which of course have to be implemented in the target language. This will be rounded out once we're able to more effectively generalize linguistic content. I view these functions as sort of patchy temporary solutions to the sentence generation problem while we figure out something more robust, which I hope is soon to come. — rae^5e <talk> 04:15, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #247 is out: References from Wikidata now available

There is a new update for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. Please, come and read it!

In this issue, we announce that is now possible to pass references in Wikidata statements, we introduce the Abstract Data dashboard, we report you on the presentation about Abstract Wikipedia at WikiCon Australia, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

Want to catch up with the previous updates? Check our archive!

Also, we remind you that if you have questions or ideas to discuss, the next Volunteers' Corner will be held on May 11, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 11:16, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

about the usage of Z33068

The use of f:Z33068 (en: paragraph from sentences) always most of the time results in the error "Reached time limit in orchestrator." So should it be used at all for now, temporarily? Or maybe there are already some tickets about this that I am not aware of? -- Asked42 (talk) 18:23, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

It previously worked, so I'm hoping whatever the issue is will be fixed soon. The current state of the wiki makes immediatism an illogical philosophy to have at the moment, in my opinion. Feeglgeef (talk) 20:16, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

This issue seems to no longer exist, you might need to clear the cache by making a dummy edit on affected articles. I implemented the function in Python (instead of composition), which has increased the speed by about 2000 ms. Feeglgeef (talk) 04:31, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Seems like working. Thank you. -- Asked42 (talk) 19:06, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Manual of Style

I've created a draft for a Manual of Style. Please feel free to comment on or make bold edits to the page. Feeglgeef (talk) 03:29, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you! That’s great and I’ll look at it more soon. I’m still taking a bit of a wikibreak. Immanuelle (talk) 22:32, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Is there anything I've written here that you think would make for a good technical section of the page? — rae^5e <talk> 00:04, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

I've added some of them. Thank you for your list of best practices by the way, I generally agree with them (I can't endorse connecting WD items currently in hope of a better technical solution, but otherwise I do). Feeglgeef (talk) 00:58, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Proposals on the architecture of Abstract Content rendering

Starting from a discussion born on the Wikifunctions Telegram chat, I've explained two different proposals on how the NLG on Abstract Wikipedia should be organized in the page User:Dv103/Abstract articles architectures. Please come to contribute to the discussion, or to propose alternatives. Dv103 (talk) 14:32, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright-footer

The copyright message has a few issues, mainly that it does not address abstract content (which is not "text"), nor object labels (which are under CC0). Proposed text:

" Text and abstract content are available under the [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License]; the labels of objects from [[f:|Wikifunctions]] are available under the [https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ Creative Commons CC0 License]; additional terms may apply. See [https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Policy:Terms_of_Use Terms of Use] for details. "

Which, when rendered, looks like:

Text and abstract content are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; the labels of objects from Wikifunctions are available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.

The message is somewhat inspired by the current one and WF's. Thoughts? Thank you! Feeglgeef (talk) 13:30, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef: As you probably imagine, this text is very tightly controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal department. I think the first port of call should be a discussion about why you might want to change things, rather than a rush to specific re-wordings, before approaching them for sign-off. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:28, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

Well I briefly summarized my justification, my proposed text was just an idea for a starting point. Basically, the abstract content is not really "text", so the footer doesn't actually tell the reader what they're allowed to do with it, and I argue that the current wording implies that the labels are licensed under CC-BY-SA 4, when they aren't. I think a change is critical as otherwise we're not showing the reader a license, or, arguably, in the case of labels, showing users a license that does not apply, which is a pretty bad thing. Feeglgeef (talk) 14:51, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Abstractwiki-suggested-functions.json

I'd think we should add f:Z33068 here. The function allows you to form a paragraph out of sentences and handles languages having different standards of whether to add a space between them, and adding it here would make finding it easier. I'm not sure what policy we want to have for the suggested functions, this idea might help formulate it. Feeglgeef (talk) 16:06, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

User:Jdforrester (WMF) tells me the page has been changed to Special:CommunityConfiguration/AbstractWikiSuggestedWikifunctions on the telegram. Feeglgeef (talk) 16:25, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

@Feeglgeef: Yup, see the weekly update on 2026-05-02. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:35, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

I also believe Z33068 should be added to the list. — rae^5e <talk> 17:25, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

Abstract Wikipedia statistics site source code

https://abstract-data.toolforge.org/ is a very useful tool, but it doesn't seem to have anything pointing to the location of its source code. Is it closed-source or unfree?

While I'm at it I feel I should suggest having language pages' paths formatted differently from how they are currently—at the moment it's /languages/Toki%20Pona when something like /languages/tok would be more suitable. — rae^5e <talk>

See gitlab:toolforge-repos/abstract-data. Also pinging @DSantamaria-WMF (thanks for the tool, by the way). NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 00:25, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you. I think a link to that repository should be put in a footer somewhere on the website as I wouldn't have found that if not for you. — rae^5e <talk> 02:30, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

@Theki: For the record, I found that repo by searching for "abstract-data" on Toolhub. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 03:34, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback and the report, fixed both things, we have now the link to the repo in the side bar footer, and also the language codes are used in the URLs. Thanks! DSantamaria-WMF (talk) 11:46, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Are you particularly attached to keeping country flag emojis next to the language names? Some consider it an anti-pattern. Arlo Barnes (talk) 16:17, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I think the use of flags is not really harmful since this is not a language selector, it is just a list of languages. Of course not every language has an associated flag, for example Latin, which does look a bit awkward, but it can't be helped. Maybe give languages without a flag a unique icon from Wikimedia Commons? e.g.

Toki Pona

instead of

🌐Toki Pona

. — rae^5e <talk> 16:37, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I thought I saw 🏛️ being used for Latin earlier. But of course, as far as the Unicode Consortium is concerned, 🇬🇧 doesn't mean 'English', no more than 🏳️‍🌈 means 'Polari'; technically, it doesn't even mean 'United Kingdom', just the letters 🇺 and 🇰 next to each other (which linguistically would indicate Ukrainian in ISO 639, but these are 'regional indicator symbols'). Arlo Barnes (talk) 17:21, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

As seems (from this comment and also others' comments) that flags are a little bit controversial, I just removed them, IMHO it was just an aesthetic concept, I like the look and feel that flags bring to the language labels, but happy to remove them if make some people feel uncomfortable with the concept. DSantamaria-WMF (talk) 05:54, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Make it more user Friendly

Make it more user-friendly by adding drag-and-drop compenots and one click additions, and make it similar to a visual macro buidler. ChippyTechGH (talk) 01:00, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Could you file something like this on phabricator? Feeglgeef (talk) 01:01, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Person infoboxes

Hi all, I've just created infobox for person (Z35167). All it can really do presently is display the name of the person in the chosen language and in the person's native language, but it's a good start. I started writing it as a composition but chose to switch to writing it in JavaScript instead, which ended up being less headache-inducing (managing a large list of strings to concatenate together is not fun, plus compositions bring lots of additional overhead). Unfortunately, this means that the actual useful parts of the infobox—the information about the person themself—is not really doable. I'd need to dereference the Wikidata property references to get their label in the requested language, but since they're references and I'm working with code, not compositions, I can't just call fetch Wikidata property (Z6822) and be done with it. If there's a WikiLambda API to do this inside of the JS itself that would be great and would solve everything, but at the moment that alone is what's holding it back, or so it seems. I can get the actual values of statements just fine, though. If I am missing some amazing WikiLambda API function that will solve this problem for me by letting me dereference the PID, then please let me know because that would be great.

If you want to look at an example of the infobox right meow, you can view Q317521 in Toki Pona and see how it states Musk's name in both Toki Pona and his native English name. COOL!

My hope is that this can be made less barebones in the near future. Infoboxes are a great way to get quick information on a subject and can fill in the informational gaps in the presently sparse articles we have at the moment, all while staying in the user's requested language. Feedback is appreciated! — rae^5e <talk> 02:58, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for this! I wonder if perhaps it would be better to create one "infobox" function and then have compositions call that, making wd retrival possible? Feeglgeef (talk) 03:38, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Working on that at the moment, I think I've got it working but I'm hitting a ratelimit in the orchestrator so I don't know for sure. The main issue with it now is that the actual infobox template (Z35175) wrapper was programmed in JS so as to not be a pain in the ass, so this means that it can only take in strings, HTML fragments, etc. so the retrieval of Wikidata stuff still needs to be done by the caller and is rather verbose (see the main implementation). The niceties will come soon later once I know that it all works at a lower level, though. — rae^5e <talk> 05:04, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

So the problem now seems to be that when label of Wikidata property in language (Z29825) isn't being faulty, it's being incredibly slow. Considering retrieving Wikidata items from their references seems to take, like, four to five seconds, and we'll have tens of statements in these infoboxes, I don't see how the property names could be retrieved in a way that doesn't cause the orchestrator to time out or hit a ratelimit. — rae^5e <talk> 06:01, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

I think I figured something out? I'm just going to try calling fetch Wikidata property or parts (Z35036), it seems to be much faster for whatever reason. — rae^5e <talk> 06:05, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

It works now, a little rough around the edges, also very slow, but I think I'm mostly happy with it. Of course it would be great if all you needed to provide to the template function to get a label-statement row was the property reference itself, but I'm too sleep-deprived to figure that out at the moment. I made five bespoke functions specifically for this infobox, more than I would like, but it's probably not that bad. I'm just hoping I didn't duplicate any functionality in trying to make the composition less verbose and repetitive. — rae^5e <talk> 07:15, 15 May 2026 (UTC)