What is it about?
Writing Wikipedia in more than 300 languages is a lot of work. We present an architecture that allows to create and maintain the content only once, and to create natural language text in all the languages of Wikipedia and fill knowledge gaps. We also present Wikifunctions, a new project to allow everyone in the world to access and write code easier.
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Why is it important?
Today, in many languages, knowledge is hard to access. Wikipedia has become an important source of knowledge for the world. We will make it easier for everyone to contribute to Wikipedia content across languages, and to have much more content available in all of the languages. We also will create a library for functions that everyone can use and contribute to. Also, both Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions will lead to novel resources that will - similar to Wikidata and Wikipedia before - lead to new research and interesting results.
Perspectives
I think that a world in which everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge - meaning that everyone can add their voice to knowledge creation but also access knowledge in their language - is a great goal. With Abstract Wikipedia we hope to provide an important step towards that goal. Also, disinformation and bias are large problems on smaller Wikipedias with smaller communities. By providing a common store of knowledge I hope we will be able to fight even more effectively against bias and disinformation. And finally, I hope that both Wikifunctions as well as Abstract Wikipedia will become a valuable resource for research.
Denny Vrandecic
Wikimedia Foundation Inc
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Building a multilingual Wikipedia, Communications of the ACM, April 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3425778.
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