Abstract Wikipedia:Project chat

Abstract Wikipedia Project chat
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Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #252 is out: Improved loading and display of Test results

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

In this issue, we present you an improvement in loading and display of Test results, we talk about our next events, 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 Denny will lead a discussion on the new NLG types in the next Natural Language Generation Special Interest Group meeting, that will be held on June 16, at 16:00 UTC (link to the meeting).

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 15:29, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

Add Z32962 to the list of suggested functions?

I think Z32962 would be a useful addition to the list of suggested functions. Can an admin please add it if others agree? Redmin (talk) 04:25, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Please comment on MediaWiki talk:AbstractWikiSuggestedWikifunctions.json. Feeglgeef (talk) 04:48, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Native labels

English Wikipedia usually displays native labels whenever applicable. Should we modify Z28016 to do the same or make a new function? Redmin (talk) 04:39, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

readiness indicator

It occurred to me that an abstract page that works well enough for one language output might be broken for another, so it would be good to have some sort of indicator in the UI of which languages might be ready for transwiki and which still need preliminaries. I'm not sure if it would be better to do this as part of the testing and error-handling, or manually (like patrolling versions, but language-specific). Arlo Barnes (talk) 07:12, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

The function NLG default text will be able to indicate on the target Wikipedia that the text in this language is not ready yet. Maybe sentences with this indicator, or even lemma's with this indicator could be excluded from the target Wikipedia. HenkvD (talk) 08:52, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

I see that in the #Marking NLG Default text section, but I am thinking more at the whole-article level; dropping a problematic fragment from the final render could change the overall meaning. Arlo Barnes (talk) 17:20, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Add an LLM generator, where you can generate the schema

Hi. Please add an LLM generator, where you can ask AI to generate a schema for Abstract wikipedia. ChippyTimeCom (talk) 01:18, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Do you mean an AI model to translate natural language input to abstract output? This was tinkered with before, I believe, last year—see f:Wikifunctions:Status updates/2025-05-09 if you would like to read about it. This idea remained a mockup and not much more from what I can tell, but they may revisit the idea someday. — rae^5e <talk> 17:40, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

The main thing stoping one from pulling up a chatbot is that it has no knowledge of what wikifunctions are available, meaning it will probably just hallucinate them. I know Gemini has an ability to upload files, but all of Wikifunctions would be too large. Feeglgeef (talk) 18:58, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

We have no obligation to use an LLM, that's just the main thing associated with the buzzword that is AI now. We can really come up with any AI model—in a general sense—that will fit our needs. You can do a lot with simple neural networks. — rae^5e <talk> 19:33, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #253 is out: The or not the, this is (the?) question

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

In this issue, we present you a delicate question regarding grammatical framework, we talk about our next events and about the results of our latest online meetings, we discuss news about Types, 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) 12:34, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

This needs to be fixed

On tennis Q847, it says "Tennis is the country of origin of England." ~2026-36465-63 (talk) 07:31, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, I've switched it around. --99of9 (talk) 09:51, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

HTML, monolingual text or String for fragments

I think there is an important issue on the Output type of parts for text segments. Currently some sentences produce String output (like f:Z26039 ) or monolingual text output ( like f:Z26570 ) pr HTML output ( like f:Z36200 ). Apart from not being consistent I think there is even a bigger issue: these types don't allow text to be set in bold (in the introduction sentence for instance), or wikilinks to other AW articles. Am I correct that is only allowed in HTML text?

If so I think we should change ALL languages functions to output type HTML as soon as possible. HenkvD (talk) 15:51, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

Currently, I am exploring this function for converting all of these to HTML fragment f:Z36303. John Samuel (talk) 16:46, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

OK, thanks. HenkvD (talk) 21:17, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

I agree that new sentence functions should be HTML. For now the old ones should be wrapped by a converter (which is best done on WF). Then all calls from AW can be to HTML producing functions. When we need bold we could either try to inject it, or write equivalent functions that will eventually replace the usage of the string ones. The string ones may still be valuable for processing some of the new NLG types, so we shouldn't actually flip the original functions. --99of9 (talk) 23:30, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

I think wrapping the functions to HTML is delaying the solution. We either need to flip all (NLG) functions or all functions should be copied to HTML versions (and the all functions shoule not be used therafter)

Option	Pro	Con
A. Wrap all fuctions to HTML	Easy to perform	This is delaying the solution
B. Flip all functions to HTML	Keeps tracebility	Huge impact/disturbance, especialy when cached
C. Copy all functions to HTML	No disturbance	Looses tracability

The most practical soulution would be option C. I woluld perfer that as soon as possbile. HenkvD (talk) 05:05, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

I like your suggestions. Based on my personal experience with different result types from Wikifunctions, I would suggest that AW support all three and convert the results to HTML using built-in functions. John Samuel (talk) 05:19, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

The reason why function need to change is because the current string functions don't allow HLTM features like bold text, wikilinks etc. AW supporting all 3 type pf output could easily be avoiding by option A. HenkvD (talk) 05:29, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

C is fine by me. The easiest first-implementation of a copied function C is a wrapper of the monolingual/string, so A is sort of the first step of C. 99of9 (talk) 06:20, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

OK, good suggestion. HenkvD (talk) 07:13, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

No. I really don't see why we should. These are functions that generate text fragments in a single language—the monolingual text type is the most appropriate return type for them. It is just text. They can be coerced to HTML extremely easily and doing that step ahead of time, hardcoded, for the sole purpose of making abstract articles marginally easier to write, is just not worth the effort and foregoes what makes the functions' return types suitable in the first place. If there is some argument that can be made for hard pivoting to HTML fragments then I am all ears, but I really don't see a reason for it. — rae^5e <talk> 05:53, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

I like to contradict. These functions create complete sentences, nd those should be able to use HLTM features like bold text, wikilinks etc. My current interest is to add HTML texts like <span lang="mul ">NLG Default text</span>. HenkvD (talk) 06:05, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

These additional features (bold/links etc) would benefit from additional parameters to control them. I still don't know how to do this best. I tried once at f:Z32496 and f:Z32410, but it may not be right, and may not be a complete solution anyway. --99of9 (talk) 06:26, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

A newer idea I had is to add all the links in the language-configured function, then call link-removing functions like f:Z36853 or f:Z36831 when composing them into AW. This could extend to swapping links for bold. Instead of an initial link, the QIDs could be wrapped with HTML spans with a QID ID, which could then be selectively converted into links or bolded etc. --99of9 (talk) 07:16, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

Simple wrapping is just to benefit the AW editor. IMO it's worth it because it's pretty easy to make a new function, so is very low cost, and for the new editors on AW, they don't have to understand composing or our WF Types. --99of9 (talk) 06:30, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

OK, let's start with option A, as a first step for option C. HenkvD (talk) 07:16, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

I have made wrappers (option A) for some general functions like f:Z36983, f:Z36983. f:Z36987, f:Z36993 and f:Z37011. f:Z32965 already existed, but as well as the monolingual f:Z26095 both have an error: Error in evaluation. Can somebody fix this? On the AW articles I have updated a few lemmas by replacing the old functions to HTML functions, but find this quite cumbersome. A few hundred lemmas should be updated, but I have no time and/or no desire to do so. In the coming weeks (or so) I will start on Option C for these functions. HenkvD (talk) 17:51, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll try to help replace some of the usage. 99of9 (talk) 07:12, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

I think I've sorted out f:Z32965. --99of9 (talk) 07:45, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

So a bunch of bespoke functions on Wikifunctions that offer some marginal improvement over their more generalized counterparts, and we expect to do all of our language generation functions this way now or something, god forbid we expend one extra function call to just wrap the output if an injection function is really that scary to you. Wrapping the functions to HTML is not 「delaying the solution」 more than it's just the least disruptive way to approach this completely frivolous problem. Are we to write all of our NLG functions to output HTML now? That is what makes sense for us now, in the future? What? We have a type for this, it's called Monolingual text. We have Python and JavaScript at our disposal, and they are wicked biznasty at string manipulation (i.e. they are very good at it), so injecting formatting into a larger sentence instead of porting the whole thing over to use HTML exclusively is really not that big of an ask. — rae^5e <talk> 07:23, 7 July 2026 (UTC)

Then please try to have this error in HTML. Currently it is ❌≪Parys (is the) haadstêd (of) Frankryk .≫❌ Please have it changed to Parys (is the) haadstêd (of) Frankryk . HenkvD (talk) 09:02, 7 July 2026 (UTC)

Thinking about this. One way we could do this particular markup would be for default monolingual functions to return a result with special language code (perhaps mul, zxx, ...). This would require wider discussion. Then the HTML function could detect that and wrap accordingly. But it doesn't solve the general problem of injections IMO. --99of9 (talk) 02:13, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

This is now working (using [mul]) at f:Z37462. This should work for all monolingual base functions, but not for those starting with strings. --99of9 (talk) 06:49, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I updated f:Z36911 and f:Z36909. I am not sure if this works as a lot is cached. The string version will probably not work yet, so I left that one using ❌≪ ≫❌. HenkvD (talk) 08:09, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

After my post I actually made that function and test even more complicated to include a call to action (CTA): a link to the function that is not configured in the requested language. I am starting to like where this is going, and think I can even get it done with strings by recognising your ❌≪ pattern, stripping it, and replacing it with a span (and a CTA link) when it turns to HTML. Unfortunately the linking requires passing in a ZID, so might need a new general conversion function with an extra parameter. --99of9 (talk) 08:40, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Here's what I did with a string function: f:Z37497. --99of9 (talk) 11:31, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

For me, injections are not so easy. A simple one is trying to inject a link to Sydney into en:"Sydney Harbour Bridge is the closest to the ocean in Sydney." (In all languages, so sometimes the subject-object order will be reversed.) But even still, I'd really like to have good injection functions, so if you're up for making them, I'll definitely use them. If they work reliably on all NLG monolingual strings, then we can use them in the wrappers (even if you think the wrappers are frivolous), and the configurations can remain deeper on the monolingual strings. --99of9 (talk) 01:56, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

I've added this test at f:Z37479. --99of9 (talk) 10:29, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #254: Working on Functions, together

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

In this issue, we report on new collaborative patterns emerging in our community, we discuss news in Types, we share some events that relate to Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia at Wikimania 2026, 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 July 6, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:58, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #255: Integration on test wiki and annual plan

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

In this issue, we discuss integration of Abstract Wikipedia in Test Wiki and our objectives for the new Wikimedia Foundation Fiscal Year, we remind you of the Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia events at Wikimania 2026, 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 July 6, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 08:22, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

Response to English Wikipedia criticism

Hi all, you might be aware of this discussion on English Wikipedia, that raised several criticisms about the project. As a team, we drafted an initial response, that we want to run through you.

If you want to suggest changes or edits, please use the talk page. Please, keep a polite and constructive tone.

The editing period will be open until July 17. The final result of this editing will be published on Meta, and will be linked to the English Wikipedia community. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:18, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #256: Moving toward our first Abstract Wikipedia integration milestone

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

In this issue, we discuss further our objectives for the new Wikimedia Foundation Fiscal Year, we show the latest community tool, we remind you of the Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia events at Wikimania 2026, 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) 09:43, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Infoboxes

I changed layout of the infoboxes, to be more in line with Wikipedia's infoboxes. See for example Z36678 "infobox for city" used in Q90 "Paris". I would like Z37625 "infobox row" to check if a claim exists in Wikidata, but I have difficulties with he parameters for Z27299 "Wikidata item has claim?". With with literal input it works but with argument references it gives an error. Who can fix this?
Furthermore I think it would be nice it we could add a pen-icon next to the values to be able to edit the claim on Wikidata, and pen-icon at the property to edit the label. HenkvD (talk) HenkvD (talk) 12:04, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I was able to fix my error. Infobox rows will now only be shown when a claim exists. That will prevent errors a particular claim is missing for a particular city. HenkvD (talk) HenkvD (talk) 13:56, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Looks awesome. Though I was trying it with other cities (such as Chicago and Moscow) in English, and it was throwing orchestrator rate limit errors. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 02:41, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

I am struggling to find a function that indicates a Wikidata property type, like Property:P569 (date of birth) is a date type (Point in time?). Can anybody help? HenkvD (talk) 09:25, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

I missed this until now. Are you still looking? GrounderUK (talk) 17:29, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, Not needed anymore. HenkvD (talk) 09:56, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

Lexemes of property names

@HenkvD, Feeglgeef, and GrounderUK: Hello. Please could anybody tell me their opinion on this question? It may be necessary to find a lexeme corresponding to the name of a property. For instance, Z28445 "most recent year-specific sentence about item" has a property reference as argument and needs the name of the property to be rendered in the output; the particular property could be population (P1082). In the English implementation, the name of the property "population" is found from the WikiData property attributes, but for other languages other syntactical information such as gender may be needed, so I suppose that a link to the lexeme is required. How should the rendering function find a link to the lexeme? Is there a way to find the item corresponding to the property? Or should the syntactical information be found some other way? Strobilomyces (talk) 15:14, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Ah. Now I've found Wikidata item of this property (P1629), so i suppose that that provides a solution. Sorry to disturb you. Strobilomyces (talk) 15:44, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Feedback needed on constructing a new abstract article

Hi all, I wanted to ask a couple of questions to the community regarding how easy or difficult is to construct a new abstract article.

Consider I'm a newbie that wants to create a new abstract article about my home city. What would you suggest I do first? Is there a sufficiently good example I can copy and adapt? Can I add already almost everything that I would like to add (say, number of inhabitants, region where my city is, mayor of the city, stuff like that) or is there something I cannot add still? What is there and what is missing at the moment?

Thanks in advance for your answers! Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:51, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Sannita, in general it is very difficult (even for me) to construct a new abstract article from scratch. Copying from an existing article is easier, as also mentioned in Help:How to create an article. That example is also a city, so we better make that article a good example. The information you mention could be in the infobox, which is also available to use and extend (if performance permits). Creating a article by copy/paste should be done for each sentence or paragraph. Add additional sentences is still very difficult. HenkvD (talk) 14:08, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

The biggest challenge for me would be finding the right functions to do the job. It's kinda to the point where the help article, mentioned by HenkvD, is just saying to copy other articles. The issue is with trying to add more "unique" sentence structures that may not be in every article. For example, take this:

New York is known for being the financial hub for the United States

More abstractly: X is known for being Y for the Z

If a function that does something like that doesn't exist, that pushes the user into a weird space where they may have to use a different function that may sound more robotic or be grammatically incorrect.

It's not hard to create a stub abstract article, but anything beyond that takes a lot of time and effort to find the right functions for the job. Additionally, dealing with different data types (ex: Wikidata item reference vs Wikidata item) may turn off people who aren't familiar with computer science principles. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 02:21, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

The problem with copying other articles is that you need to somehow know that the article you're copying from is correct. If I wanted, for example, to make an article about some root vegetable like Q188614 and copied Q81 I'd be doing a very bad job because the second paragraph is written in a way that is completely untranslatable in its structure (by that I mean it is not fixable by changing f:Z18845 to a function that work for all languages, the fragment itself integrates features of English grammar, such as SVO word order, and therefore needs a rewrite).

What you probably need is a collection of Featured Articles that are written in accordance with best practices and are safe to copy from. This would make it so novice users don't start picking up anti-patterns and propagating them all over abstract Wikipedia, making them harder to fix. Warudo (talk) 15:32, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Absolutely correct. I've deleted that paragraph with an explanation that that kind of work is better done on Wikifunctions to construct an English renderer. 99of9 (talk) 12:20, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

I'm throwing together some thoughts at User:99of9/ArticleWriting. It's still very much a draft, but I hope the ideas help. Asking questions about it may help me focus on what you want. --99of9 (talk) 11:53, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

To be honest I don't think we are ready to start adding new articles at full speed. Only a few functions can be used properly, and not many functions can be used in enough other languages. Furthermore the performance is so bad that most of the functions will time-out. Personally i consider the AW articles as sandboxes to experiment on, not yet articles that are well constructed. HenkvD (talk) HenkvD (talk) 12:33, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T430898

Single fragments usually don't time out when you first put them in. So you can usually edit productively in your first session. But then 24 hours later, the whole thing gets re-cached in a single go, none of them complete, and the errors all get cached. --99of9 (talk) 12:42, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Discussion at Meta Requests for comment: The future of Abstract Wikipedia

 You are invited to join the discussion at Meta Requests for comment: The future of Abstract Wikipedia. Qcne (talk) 11:34, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Feedback on function I created

I would ask this in the Telegram channel, but this is a longwinded question that I would like to get more detailed feedback on.

First and foremost, it is seriously important that we get the ability to call functions with python/JS implementations. It would make creating these types of functions ten times faster, with the additional benefit of being easier to read.

I'm relatively close to completion on a function that will create a brief introductory paragraph for species articles: Intro for species in English composition. It contains the following:

• Intro (e.g. "Homo sapiens, also known as the Human, is a species of primate in the family Hominidae.")
  • The word "primate" in this case is a string supplied by the user and is optional - it could be anything they want (ex: humanoid, animal, bipedal creature, etc)
• Year of description (e.g. "The species was described in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus.")
• IUCN conservation status (e.g. "C. lupus has been assessed as Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).")

So all together:

Dionaea muscipula, also known as the Venus flytrap, is a species of carnivorous plant in the family Droseraceae. The species was described in 1768 by John Ellis. D. muscipula has been assessed as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

It also works when there is a lot of taxon authors:

The species was described in 2026 by Anh Van Pham, Chung Van Hoang, Nguyen Quang Truong, Thuy Thu Thi Nguyen, Ky Danh Nguyen, Toan Canh Thai and Thomas Ziegler.

The composition itself is basically stringing together a lot of html fragments - if you want to find a specific bit, you just scroll down to around the section of the paragraph you want. Each HTML fragment is roughly a sentence.

I originally intended to add a sentence about distribution, but I didn't know how nicely that would play when P9714 has a million values attached to it. Eventually I plan to integrate this translation into a system like the one that exists for year articles.

I have a couple questions:

• Is there any other additions to this function that I should make? Ideally, this should be data I can fetch from Wikidata.
• What are the best practices to make the function easier to translate? I've tried to rely on other functions which can work with different languages (and making my own, including Z37833)
• I'm still relatively new to Wikifunctions. If someone could take a look and see if there is any glaring errors or functions that exist and do what I am already doing, that'd be awesome.

I am aware of a couple bugs:

• The error handling is not great, and the sentence about description date has a hardcoded true value in the if function. I'm looking for a better way to deal with the errors - the main idea for this is to stop the function from generating sentences if the necessary values don't exist in Wikidata.
• A function I made (Z37808) that fetches the describing authority crashes if the person does not have a label in the given language.

Feel free to edit/fix anything if you want to. Thanks a ton! EatingCarBatteries (talk) 08:32, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Nice one. I'll take a look. My general comment is that the extra supplied string (e.g. for the family) should not be a string, it should be a different QID. This is because in Abstract Wikipedia we can't pass in single-language strings. The function needs to somehow get from the QIDs all the way to the HTML by itself. Once you've got the structure ready, the next thing you can do is include your examples as Tests. The easiest way to make an HTML test for a function which already has a configuration is to make one with an empty validation comparison, run it, then copy the stuff it failed with into the validation. --99of9 (talk) 10:21, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Oh, one more structural change. Even though this is for "English", it's usually best to accept an extra parameter for the "language variant", because there are a bunch of variants of English (which, for example, may have different common names). You may not use it for now, but it's a pain to change the arguments after the function has a lot of use. 99of9 (talk) 10:24, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

And if you need the "of primate" hypernym to be optional, you could include a boolean parameter to say whether or not to print whatever QID is supplied. Or another idea, (this may be controversial) you could decide that if both QIDs were the same, that was when to drop the "of human". This second method would work particularly well in AW IMHO, because it would autofill both to be the same as the page QID, so it would work from the start without even clicking a boolean (and editors could then pick another QID if they wanted a hypernym). --99of9 (talk) 99of9 (talk) 10:31, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #257: Beyond syntactic tables

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

In this issue, we discuss syntactic tables and news in Types, we show some community blogposts and tools, we remind you of the Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia events at Wikimania 2026, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

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

We also remind you that in the next weeks these newsletter reminders will be paused, and that they will resume in mid-August.

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 10:55, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions Reached rate limit

When I open Q408, the article is full of "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Reached rate limit in evaluator" except for some titles and images. This happens on many other pages. Steven Sun (talk) 12:11, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

This issue is tracked in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T430898 . The error codes sometimes get recategorised, but it ultimately seems to be some kind of rate issue. --99of9 (talk) 13:46, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

The problem of categories

As it stands, categories require you to physically type the link into the source editor (e.g. [[Category:Living people]]), which would require a page to be made, thereby nullifying the abstract page.

I predict many wikis would like to be able to categorize Abstract articles, as in my opinion, any page that has substantial content (even if it doesn't exist yet) is worth categorizing. They may not populated in normal categorizes, but it could be something like this:

• Category:Abstract articles about living people
• Category:Abstract articles about STEM
• Category:Abstract articles about health
• Category:Abstract articles about geographic places
• Category:Abstract articles about extant species
• and more, at the choice of the language's community

(similar to that of draft categories)
Additionally, regarding only Abstract Wikipedia, it would be nice to be able to add (and see) local categories to abstract pages. We have over 2000 pages already, and the only way to find any of them is to go to Special:AllPages, Special:LongPages, or to click the random page button. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 00:09, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

Good suggestion. Can you put in a Phabricator feature request to figure out how to categorise? --99of9 (talk) 06:40, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

Sure! EatingCarBatteries (talk) 06:56, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

Suggested functions changed

I've swapped the suggested functions per the discussion on the talk page at MediaWiki talk:AbstractWikiSuggestedWikifunctions.json. Please let me know if this causes any trouble editing. In particular @User:Denny, User:DVrandecic (WMF), User:Sannita (WMF), User:Jdforrester_(WMF) if will hinder your presentation, I'm happy to revert for a while if you are relying on the old list. If you're not relying on it, I'm confident that the new list is better for newcomers. Too many of them have been misled by the previous list. --99of9 (talk) 06:36, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

@99of9: Thanks! That looks great. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 07:12, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

"replace Abstract Wikipedia link to QID with bold" doesn't work if the label of QiD is the same of the dependency

HI, I'm creating some stubs about the capitals of the world. In case like Luxembourg or Monaco-Ville the funcion above doesn't work, probably because it reads twice the words Luxembourg and Monaco Mastrocom (talk) 14:54, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

I've fixed by replacing the literal value with the QID Mastrocom (talk) 16:31, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

Expanding FAQ to correct common misconceptions

re: The ongoing closure RfC on Meta, I thought it might help to make a Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not (Q4345841) for AW. I didn't feel it was my place to do so, so I gathered a list of misconceptions on the FAQ's talk page which can be used as a starting point. YoshiRulz (talk) 02:52, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

The points all have an answer now, ready for copyediting. And there's still the question of where to put them. YoshiRulz (talk) 03:05, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #258: Abstract Wikipedia at Wikimania

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

In this issue, we discuss the presentations and workshops at Wikimania, including a features feedback request based on what we heard there, and highlight new features shipped this week including diffs for Wikifunctions.

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

Enjoy the reading! Quiddity (WMF) 19:05, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

Suggestions wanted for early pilot articles to make available cross-wiki

Hey all,

We're building up to the first pilot release of cross-wiki abstract articles, where one community's sysops will be able to pick some (or none) of certain abstract articles onto their wiki for their readers to see. To demonstrate the system at all, we picked five general topics: Paris and London, Wikipedia, and our commonly-used "example" topics of Douglas Adams and Jupiter. (You can see the available list at Special:PreviewAbstract.)

However, these are probably not the best or only topics to get started with. We're going to be only making a small selection available to start with, but we'd love your ideas of what articles are the best early demonstrators of the work you're all doing. (I appreciate that this may be influenced by which pilot wiki or wikis are using them, so happy for you to have further ideas later, of course!)

What 3–5 articles do you collectively think we should add to this list?

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

I think the proposed articles are already available on the target pilot communities/pilot Wikipedia's. I therefore propose other type or articles

• an Italian politician, only available in Italian language
• small towns in the smaller target Wikipedia's
• a species only available in one language

Furthermore I don't think the larger wikipedia's (en/de/fr/es) are open for this kind of experiments, but I could be wrong.

HenkvD (talk) 05:34, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, I heavily doubt enwiki will be open to Abstract Wikipedia integration given the fiasco that has been happening. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 21:54, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

I really like the diverse range of these five selected articles (Special:PreviewAbstract.). I feel that we can further expand the list. We currently have infoboxes covering topics such as astronomy, chemistry, media, GLAM, history, computer science, and Wikimedia movements (including Wikimania). We also have infoboxes for languages alongside inflection tables, which should particularly interest Wiktionary communities. For example, article on French grammar.

Additionally, some of the recent articles on AW are multilingual, while others are bilingual (English and French, showcasing how we can handle tenses and pronoun usage). A more detailed selection of articles is a great way to demonstrate that Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia can effectively support both simple and complex articles. John Samuel (talk) 18:55, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Just for your information, the French grammar article is incorrect, because both sub-level articles about pronouns are incorrect and therefore the table found on all three is wrong. "on" is a singular, third person pronoun, and always conjugated as such. Its use as a plural, first person one is purely informal/colloquial and should absolutely never be seen anywhere on Wikipedia. It is a very basic mistake that no French speaker of even rudimentary proficiency would have missed, so I wonder how this table was generated. If that is the kind of example you plan to showcase as proof of concept, or integrate into Wiktionary, I would seriously reconsider, especially since French is one of the biggest languages in the movement, not one of the much smaller ones supposedly targeted by abstractwiki. Choucas (talk) 15:09, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing this out. This content actually comes directly from a Wikifunctions function, so I’ll fix that. GrounderUK (talk) 18:56, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

@Choucas: thanks for letting us know but I disagree and en:Personal pronouns in French disagrees too. The fact it's informal and colloquial means it shouldn't be used in sentences but on a table showing all the possibilities, it should absolutely be present. Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 07:48, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

If you clicked on the interwiki link on my userpace, you have probably seen that like you, I am a native speaker, so there is no need to explain to me how personal pronouns work in French. If the table looked the same as on the enwiki page, with the additional columns and footnotes, then yes, there would be no harm in showing the subtleties around the use of "on". However, currently the table is three rows and two columns, with no explanation whatsoever, and within the rest of the page it clearly implied it is conjugated as a plural first person pronoun. Either there is a full table, or there is a simplified one and "on" is put in singular third person, but having it only in first person plural was just wrong. That is really the only thing I was pointing at, albeit in way less many words. Choucas (talk) 09:44, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that (I hope) was the fix I applied on Wikifunctions. The inclusion of “on” as a third-person singular pronoun was reversed this morning. Hopefully we’ll see an expanded table in due course! GrounderUK (talk) 10:16, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

@GrounderUK We will need a detailed table to avoid confusion. I temporarily removed it from the table. John Samuel (talk) 10:18, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

@Choucas For the time being, I removed "on" since it requires a detailed explanation (I will add when we are able to add more complex sentences.). However, English Wikipedia article needs to be corrected as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_pronouns_in_French#Subject_pronouns John Samuel (talk) 10:17, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I think we need a process (like this but more structured) where the AW community decides which articles are ready to be "released", before they can be taken up by other wikis. Otherwise (as Choucas highlighted above), we risk losing credibility by making available drafts or serious errors. I'm not saying they need to be perfect before release, but I think it should be a community decision at this end as well as the other end (the language-wiki embedding them). Since this batch is the first, I think we should even vote on whether we support each of the 5 the team chose as ready. What do others think? --99of9 (talk) 04:14, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

I agree that we might need a process now in the early days, but we should when creating such policy document the ambition that we eventually would like to make it solely in the hands of the reusing community. ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 09:52, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

I fully agree that we need a clear process, including a decision by the AW community on the quality of the pilot articles before they are released to the target wikis. It should also be explicit which target wikis and communities are in scope.

On Help:Abstract articles, I read that English, German, French, and Spanish Wikipedias are in scope as target communities. Does this mean that, for example, the English Wikipedia community has expressed interest in participating as a pilot?

Regarding Dagbani, Igbo, and Hausa, these languages currently have either no configured language functions or only one. Before selecting pilot articles, the process should begin with configuring and testing the necessary language functions in those languages. Only after that foundation is in place would it make sense to start identifying and evaluating potential pilot articles. HenkvD (talk) 10:21, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

It’s not very clear. I think it just means that during the pilot period, any pilot community’s language would be added to the limited set of languages for which previews would be available. From the final paragraph in Help:Abstract articles#Language coverage, it appears that the Abstract Wikipedia community would ultimately control which languages are supported (expecting most or all). GrounderUK (talk) 18:27, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

I think Abstract Wikipedia contributors need some way to indicate that an article is a draft or otherwise inadequate, based on the quality of the information it currently provides. GrounderUK (talk) 18:41, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps, but I hope we won't try for a system that requires us to that manually article by article. I imagine that we will create, for example, one good set of functions to create an abstract article about tennis players or lakes and then bot create tens of thousands in one go. And obviously we should have some high standards for when to run the bot, but it will then be unrealistic to check them one by one by hand. A tool that says which ones renders flawlessly and in which languages would be great (and even better if it can also give reports for what is missing for those who can't, like missing data on Wikidata or lexemes or lables in that language). ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 21:34, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

I’m not in favour of bot-created articles. But the quality-assurance challenges exist even with changes to a single Wikifunctions function or Wikidata lexeme (for example). That’s why we will need article diffs that show how the rendered content has changed over time, not just the article structure. GrounderUK (talk) 09:49, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Early on in the development, there was talk about "template articles" to be used for all articles of a certain topic (like soccer players or lakes). That is not in the development plan any longer. And if we neither have that nor going to create articles in bulk, I don't think I have any interest in this project any longer. ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 10:29, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

I’m just expressing my personal reservations about bot-articles. Templates and information-rich functions (like infoboxes or introductory content) are a different matter. Ultimately, I think the development plan needs to align with the needs of the content creators and content consumers, rather than the other way around (recognizing that resources are always limited, of course). GrounderUK (talk) 10:42, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't mean templates in the traditional Wikipedia sense. Rather that we have an entire abstract article as a template. Like the "canonical lake article". Which would mean that an improvement of the template improved all abstract articles about lakes (that hadn't been subst:ed and individually developed because it was a lake someone cared extra about). ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 11:14, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

We don't have templates, but instead we do already have some intro sentences, like Z37922 (intro for species) and Z38757 (person lead sentence with occupations). Personally I think that once enough functions are available in enough languages we could create thousands of bot articles for cities, species, soccer players, lakes etc.Into senetences combined with infoboxes that would provide enough basic information in my opinion. Details information can then be added on article by article basis. HenkvD (talk) 11:46, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that’s what I thought. I don’t think it’s technically difficult, but the subject-specific content would generally have to come from Wikidata or Commons, wouldn’t it? I’d be more inclined to say: here are the editorial “facts” (which may or may not be present on Wikidata), and here is one standard representation of those facts (which may or may not be an article, as such). But I appreciate this is off-topic. GrounderUK (talk) 18:50, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Yes. I don’t think the team have already decided that those articles are ready, but that is clearly a community decision. GrounderUK (talk) 18:45, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

There is 2 different things here. The topics and the content.

For the topics, the list is good, albeit too general. Adding a place (maybe a small town or a building like a small chapel), a species (some kind of fish) a more mundane person (some John Doe unlike the famous Douglas Adams) would be better to demonstrate the diversity of possibilities (the "template" works for every/most human, not just for "famous" ones). I think it needs to be topics that have no article yet on most Wikipedia (unlike London that already exists on most Wikipedia).

For the content, it's an other separate matter entirely. There is improvements but we are still a bit far from the minimum expected. We should keep working on that

Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 07:41, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Ping on this; it'd be great to have some specific examples to add to the load testing. "an Italian politician" is fine, but which one? etc. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:53, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF): sure, why not:

• d:Q177978 (a not-so-famous French painter with a lot of data in Wikidata and only existing on 17 Wikipedias)
• d:Q3639574 (a library/archive in Italy, 3 articles right now)
• d:Q141099118 (a recently discovered specie, only 2 articles)

@HenkvD, 99of9, Ainali, GrounderUK, EatingCarBatteries, and Jsamwrites: what do you think of my proposals? do you have other ideas?

Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 12:45, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: None of those topics have articles yet, which make them very poor tests of the infrastructure. :-) But if you're going to get them created as good example articles, awesome. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 12:52, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

• OK for d:Q177978 a not-so-famous French painter
• Maybe: d:Q3639574 a library/archive in Italy
• Not OK d:Q141099118 no common names, not much details. I will try to look for an other species.
• We also need a settlement.

HenkvD (talk) 14:13, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

• Proposed species d:Q3087908 Butterfly with only 7 articles, and many statements in Wikidata.

HenkvD (talk) 15:44, 19 August 2026 (UTC)

@VIGNERON I have started working on d:Q177978. Wikidata has lots of information about the artist. It could be an interesting article.

Reference: https://abstract.wikipedia.org/view/en/Q177978 John Samuel (talk) 14:47, 20 August 2026 (UTC)

I started Urt (Q842706) to see what could be written about a small French commune. Well, not a lot of complex things but it will soon be better than the old automated stubs that most of the Wikipedias have (most of them are empty and outdated...). Ornithorynque liminaire (talk) 22:08, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

OK, we're going with these three you suggested and created:

• Q177978
• Q842706
• Q3087908

We'll deploy this tomorrow, and they'll start getting generated from next week. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #259: Congratulations Jules*. An apple is a fruit

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

In this issue, we congratulate Wikimedian of the Year and we discuss his favourite article in relation to Abstract Wikipedia, we introduce a new Type of function on Wikifunctions, and we take a look at the latest software developments.

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

We also remind you that in the next weeks these newsletter reminders will be paused, and that they will resume in mid-August.

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:19, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

While I understand the point this little apple story is trying to make, I am afraid this whole thing falls flat for a very simple reason: we are not in 2002 anymore. Wikipedia is not a wild new idealistic thing, that only years of work by passionate volunteers will prove can succeed. Even worse, this is actually showing that this new start of the road in 2026 is even rougher and less promising than how it was in 2002: indeed, at that time, absolutely anyone could come in any newly set up Wikipedia in their own language and type the equivalent of "an apple is a fruit" and be done in a matter of fifteen seconds. That is why all these apples grew: because it was as simple as adding more words in your own language, and correcting the words of others, and that was (and still is) the magic of it. Instead, Abstract is starting from scratch again, with an impossibly high technical complexity to add even the most basic sentence or correct the simplest typo, making the growth of any article an exponentially more complex endeavor. I am not blind to the charm of the idea behind Abstract, but it is hard to look at what it involves in practice and see how it makes sense in 2026. Choucas (talk) 15:33, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I see you've come here from the RfC.
The method of producing articles by translating individual sentences is possible on AW, but is of course antithetical to the "improve every language at once" nature of the project.
It's always going to be more work to add to an abstract article than just writing text, and that's acceptable because that work has a greater impact too. It will be the choice of each editor whether they want to contribute here or to a local wikitext article. YoshiRulz (talk) 03:03, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

@Choucas and YoshiRulz: you make a good point, looked at in isolation: writing one sentence is easier than writing one Wikifunction. But on Abstract Wikipédia you don't write sentence (nor translate), you set up pattern (a Wikifunction) that can be used on many articles (potentially all of them, we can imagine a point not so far away where all abstract Wikipedia pages would simply call one big general function "make an article", you can have a look at Q18498). The difference is like making an addition 1+1+1+1+... (Wikipedia method) and making a multiplication 5000*1 (Wikifunctions method). So at the start, it may seems to be more work but very quickly it's better and faster with much less work. And yes, Wikifunctions are not for everyone (just like Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata are not for everyone) and won't replace Wikipedia (it goes without saying, but since it reuse the "Wikipedia" name, it should probably be said). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 07:03, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #260: Shoutout to User:99of9

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

In this issue, we congratulate our own User:99of9 for his extensive work with the Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia communities, we discuss what happened at Wikimania, we introduce a document for interested communities to join Abstract Wikipedia, 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) 15:55, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

IDE plugin?

I think we can make this a [ VSCode / Emacs / Notepad++ / vi / ed ] plugin so it doesn't take forever to achieve stuff by clicking at the webpage.

I'm bad at programming (read: C minus at college) and I expect this to involve Wikimedia API programming and stuff... IrisChronomia (talk) 11:05, 20 August 2026 (UTC)

The relevant concept seems to be Q30251139. Arlo Barnes (talk) 21:18, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #261: Mayors and the North

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

In this issue, we have an essay from Denny about accidental gaps in languages, 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) 09:40, 21 August 2026 (UTC)

How should Abstract Wikipedia work?

What do we think, as a community?

Abstract Wikipedia talk:About#How does Abstract Wikipedia work? GrounderUK (talk) 09:42, 25 August 2026 (UTC)

I have particular reservations about simply acquiring data from Wikidata. On the one hand, it keeps the abstract article up to date but, on the other hand, it means our language-neutral content is not necessarily actively curated.

I don’t see a simple solution to this, but I believe we should, as a minimum, distinguish between content that is explicitly curated on the Abstract Wikipedia article page and that which is obtained from Wikidata when the function call is evaluated. GrounderUK (talk) 13:50, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

improve diffs

Right now, when we try to check changes that happened to an article, the site only shows the functions and item/lexeme codes, not in a natural language form, making moderating and tracking changes quite challenging. Is there a way to allow both the code and the natural language changes to be available while checking diffs? Omar M. Ghaly (talk) 08:34, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm finding it difficult also. BigKrow (talk) 18:56, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #262: Wikifunctions Object Reference

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

In this issue, we discuss a new Type implemented after a community request, 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) 12:31, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Who is this for?

I've had a bash at creating a few articles here, and whilst I get the general premise I can't help but think who is the target audience here? Not just for reading the articles, but for creating them as well. At the moment, and I know it's early-days, creating an article is not exactly easy. You have to be fairly technically minded and understand functions, their inputs and outputs, and you have to know which functions suit your needs. None of which is currently intuitive or particularly available. On the other hand is the consumption audience. Who is this aimed at to read abstract articles? Humans? AI? It almost feels like a solution searching for a problem. Don't get me wrong, this is an impressive bit of software, but I just don't understand where it sits in WM's portfolio. Osarius (talk) 20:23, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Did you read Abstract Wikipedia:About? ♥Ainali ^discussion_{contributions} 08:34, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Also, in my opinion, the goal is to realize the vision of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge across all languages. I could have specified 'all human languages,' but the potential of Wikifunctions goes beyond that to include constructed languages as well. While 'all' may sound ambitious, that is the core vision—who knows, we might even be able to generate short articles in Sumerian one day. 

To answer your second question: since Abstract Wikipedia is being built by humans, it will serve as a space where people discuss and reach consensus on expressing even simple facts across languages (such as "An apple is a fruit"), likely sourced from Wikidata. Ultimately, it will be used by humans, potentially via conversational agents—though it is too early to predict exact use cases given current advances in AI. John Samuel (talk) 08:54, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

@Osarius Basically Abstract Wikipedia create articles that can be shown on (many) other Wikipedia's if that community allows it. Only Articles that are not already present on the target Wikipedia. So the audience will be on the target Wikipedia's. This is not yet activated but we are starting pilots, see Abstract Wikipedia:For interested communities. But first functions should be written for those languages, Wikidata labels should be updated, Wikidata Lexemes should be updated or created. HenkvD (talk) 15:42, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Requests for protection page?

There probably should be a requests for protection page. ReXLer (talk) 15:35, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Considering the size of the wiki, for now, I would say Abstract Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard is suffiencient. ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 05:27, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #263: 5,000 Functions, passing Z40000

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

In this issue, we mark the 5,000th function on Wikifunction, we explore a new Type for functions, 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 September 7, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 11:00, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #264: Your code can now call back to the Wikidata fetch functions

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

In this issue, we introduce the possibility of calling Wikidata fetch functions, we present a new Type, we celebrate more than 200 new functions this week, 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) 13:13, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

More visibility for page for interested communities

Hi all, we prepared a landing page for potential Wikipedia communities that want to try out Abstract Wikipedia, and wanted to showcase it a bit more. In your opinion, is it a good idea to put that page into the sidebar together with the community portal and the project chat? Or do you suggest other venues as better or as additional places? Let me know here! Sannita (WMF) (talk) 08:36, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

I’d suggest the Main Page under “Get Started”. Perhaps that’s too much visibility, but it encourages contributors to work within existing language communities, where they exist, even if their community is not ready to consider integrating Abstract Wikipedia into their Wikipedia edition. I’d also consider the Community portal to be appropriate.

I wouldn’t link directly from the sidebar, but we could consider an “in your language” link to a translatable landing page, from which contributors could find language-specific project pages. This would also cover the case where the language they are interested in is not their current interface language. The language-specific pages could link to relevant on-wiki discussions, particularly where communities are already actively involved or have concluded that they have other priorities or specific preconditions. GrounderUK (talk) 13:14, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

The next Natural Language Generation Special Interest Group meeting is tomorrow!

Hi all! A quick message to inform you that Denny will lead a quick first introduction to syntactic phrase functions in the next Natural Language Generation Special Interest Group meeting, that will be held tomorrow, September 15, at 16:00 UTC (link to the meeting).

See you at the meeting! In case you can't join, the meeting will be recorded and made available on Commons. -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:27, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Creating abstract articles are difficult to me

Hi, sorry, new on AW and don't know if this is the right place to put it, but yeah.

I wanted to create an abstract article on my language Tumbuka, but the tutorial at Help:How to create an article seemed really confusing. Tried the tutorial and immediately disbanded because I got lost quickly.

Any easier ways to do this? Thank you. Viyowoyero-vya-Malaŵi (talk) 13:30, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

To start with, for which topic did you want to create an article? Articles are organized by topic (from Wikidata:) and not by language since the goal is to have abstract content that can produce text in different languages. Here's the article Q11573 as an example. — Arlo Barnes (talk) 17:56, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes sorry, I wanted to create the article on the topic of the Tumbuka language. It's my language so I wanted to make an abstract article on it. Thank you. Viyowoyero-vya-Malaŵi (talk) 23:29, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah, I see; sorry for misreading. Well, a good first edit I think would be putting no such object on Q34138...which I now see you already did. — Arlo Barnes (talk) 21:50, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

All good. I understand it now. Have a great day. Viyowoyero-vya-Malaŵi_★^★_★ 11:49, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

Automatic "about" hatnotes

Some ideas I had:

• P1889 'different from' should be relatively easy to make use of. This article is about the {{#statements:P31}}. For the {{#statements:P31|from={{#statements:P1889}}}}, see {{#statements:P1889}}.
  • Should this also pull from P1382 'partially co-incident with'? If two concepts are similar enough to warrant linking with P1382, would you expect each to be mentioned in the body of the other's article?
• I'm curious if and how P460 'said to be the same as' (and P2959 'permanent duplicated item') would work in a wiki with no redirects—there probably shouldn't be separate abstract articles for Venus (Q313) and the Morning Star (Q12601444), for example, and it would be an editorial decision as to which QID is used. Should the other QID(s) be populated with just a hatnote as a "soft redirect"?
• The other thing language wikis do with redirects+hatnotes is disambiguation. AW uses QIDs as titles so that half of the problem doesn't exist, but since readers will be using natural language to search for articles, they may end up on the article for an Item which happens to share a label with the one they were after. For example, w:en:ball says For the event, see Ball (dance event)., but ball (Q18545) doesn't (and probably shouldn't) have a P1889=ball (Q478515). But they are linked via Lexemes: this call is a proof-of-concept for retrieving the data needed for such a disambiguation hatnote. It's specific to one language, but I don't see why a hatnote Function shouldn't be localised to the point of returning outputs with different meanings in each language.

YoshiRulz (talk) 08:11, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Hatnotes shouldn't be automatic. d:Q90 has a list of 35 other locations named "Paris" that it's different from (plus a "Paris Township" and a Wikipedia disambiguation page). Editorial judgment is needed to decide which ones are important and which ones aren't.

One thing WikiFunctions can do is selectively display disambiguation hatnotes based on language. For example, someone speaking English might reasonably confuse a d:Q18545 "ball" with a d:Q478515 "ball", requiring a hatnote to disambiguate, but a Spanish-speaker is unlikely to confuse a "pelota" with a "fiesta de baile", so no hatnote should be displayed. Carnildo (talk) 08:30, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Great ideas. The question might be more, in my opinion: which tools do we need to make good use of the existing 4 properties @YoshiRulz cited? which other tools do we need to identify the other cases of potential confusion, which are language-dependant (and culture/context dependant).

I would argue we would need a viz tool (based on Wikidata and Wiktionaries probably) to better understand thoses cases. At some point, we will also need to ask experts from a certain domain and a diversity of background - workshops at global academic conferences could be a good place for that.

In the mean time, we could start working on the functions proposed by @Carnildo. Happy to help at some point. Ornithorynque liminaire (talk) 19:20, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah, and side note: @Jsamwrites already created f:Z40059, which uses P1889, and it is already used on 34 AW articles, notably in == See also == sections (quite clever). Ornithorynque liminaire (talk) 19:24, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #265: More engaging error messages

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

In this issue, we explain how we reworked error messaging, we talk about our recent and upcoming meetings, 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) 12:59, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

Boundaries of knowledge

Hi there,

I created f:Z42779 <definition is different depending on>; for now it is used just once, on Q186030 (contemporary art). This function makes explicit how a concept may very depending on the language, the authors, etc. I see it as a very important in our work to align different cultures and languages around encyclopedic concepts. The main risk of our great project (and, to be fair, for most Wikimedia projects) is to impose occidental or even anglo-saxon concepts to the rest of the works. So I saw epistemic functions as a path forward - and this is the first of them. Happy to discuss here what should be the next steps!

(btw, I created a French implementation and a [mul] one, for once, the English implementation is not even created, feel free to add it)

Ornithorynque liminaire (talk) 19:14, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

will Abstract Wikipedia support element ID tags that generate on-the-fly data containers?

For example, if i type in a search query such as "climate data for Europe", will i ever be able to see in front of me a page consisting of climate tables using a template like the Wikipedia weatherbox, without the need to fetch the surrounding text of the pages for those cities? I think this may be called container-based design. Is it not possible currently on Wikipedia because by default MediaWiki sees all pages as unbroken chains of text, so there is no ability to fetch a part of a page by its container ID. and it could be used for many other things besides climate. the general case Im thinking of is to fetch one single element with a specific tag from a long list of pages and assemble all those tagged items on the same screen.

I think this would be a highly valuable research tool.

Best regards,

Soap (talk) 21:42, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Tabular data on Commons can't be imported at the moment. If that feature is added, then we could automate tables like the one you linked, and you could use that Function outside of Abstract Wikipedia. Can you elaborate on your research use-case? There may be an existing tool which is more suitable. YoshiRulz (talk) 09:58, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #266: Memoization arriving

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

In this issue, we talk about storing a function call's result in a cache for easier recalling, we analyse how quickly one particular fact propagates through different Wikipedia language editions, 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) 09:54, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Potential city articles for Abstract Wikipedia pilot communities

Dear community,

We are approaching the time where the deployment of the Abstract Wikipedia project will happen in three pilot communities (Malayalam, Dagbani, and Igbo). As part of this work, we have been looking at content gaps across wikis and we found that an interesting one is around cities and how often they get updated. Denny spoke about the level of updatedness of Paris in his last Weekly update.

For example, we identified a number of gaps across the three pilot communities, i.e. abstract articles existing on Abstract Wikipedia but not on the pilot wikis. In light of this, we would like you to consider articles about cities as a potential focus area, as the pilot communities can probably decide that these will be the first articles to integrate on their Wikipedias.

Do you think it is possible to create some sort of a “local sprint” on this focus area? We are open to feedback. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:57, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Any effort should focus on quality, not quantity: I looked at a random sampling of AW's current city articles, and about half of them are at or below the "an apple is a fruit" level of completeness. There also needs to be a focus on ease of translation: those cities were variously described as being a "city", a "capital city", a "borough", a "municipality of Brazil", a "municipality with town privileges in the Czech Republic", and a "direct-administered municipality" -- quite the collection of words and phrases you'd need to translate to get them to work in a new language. Carnildo (talk) 21:03, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

These 7 are on the level 3 (top 1000) list, and have no article on dagwp nor igwp: Q174, Q727, Q956, Q1156, Q3130, Q3766, Q8684.
Are there article layout conventions written up somewhere? I looked in projectspace and helpspace and didn't see any. YoshiRulz (talk) 12:36, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

No layout conventions, it's a free-for-all at the moment. When I do it I roughly model on the en-wiki structure of that city. --99of9 (talk) 13:29, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

@Sannita (WMF) Even though some of the city articles are in basic form, I think Paris is a good example (to demonstrate what's available and what's not in a given language). I updated Wikidata labels in Latin and Malayalam today (for infobox and see also section). So the infoboxes in English, French, Latin, and Malayalam should work. Check my test cases on WF. Best, John Samuel (talk) 06:51, 4 October 2026 (UTC)

@Carnildo @YoshiRulz @99of9 @Jsamwrites Thank you for your interventions, very much appreciated. I wanted to ask also another thing: what do you think of a potential wiki page of articles "ready for sharing" with pilot communities, based on your judgement? Would it be possible to set one up? Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:50, 8 October 2026 (UTC)

My article review?

I have been working on creating Q115518310 over the past few days. I feel that it has reached a good stopping point for now. Since I made it through trial and error, there might be some parts that do not quite follow convention. If there is anywhere that can be improved, I look forward to your feedback. 鈴音雨 (talk) 07:54, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

I think it is the best article we have so far! Congratulations. 99of9 (talk) 01:17, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata Sitelink changes in Recent Changes and Watchlist

(Apologies for cross-posting in English, translating it will help spread the message)

Editors on group 1 wikis, including Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource, will no longer see notifications on Recent Changes and Watchlist when a link to another language version of a page is added, removed, or changed in its Wikidata item. This change will begin on October 5 at 07:00 UTC as a two-week trial to reduce high-volume, low-value notifications and make higher-value changes easier to identify. Editors who rely on these notifications should be aware of the change and can share feedback or concerns on the project or talk page.
Please reach out if you have any questions, thank you! -- Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) sent via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:42, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #267: Refreshing results

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

In this issue, we talk about two new capabilities addressing the issues of caching and freshness of function call results, we introduce our groundwork to support the first pilot communities for Abstract Wikipedia, we discuss news in Types, 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) 09:31, 2 October 2026 (UTC)