Talk:Abstract Wikipedia
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Not putting all eggs in one basket: the alternative to Abstract Wikipedia
[edit]I doubt Abstract Wikipedia could ever be used to write long comprehensive articles. It doesn't have the potential to be used to write articles like en:Lymphatic system or en:Expressionism or en:Cosmology and is quite limited in what can be achieved with it.
This is partly because it takes much longer for people to write anything in its functions syntax; it's much more difficult to create and edit; and it's much more text – for an example see what's needed for the short sentence in en:Abstract Wikipedia#Example which is data in Wikidata turned into natural language which is what most sentences I think will probably be like (existing WD data and new data inserted into it).
How useful having a number of multilingual articles that are just a few paragraphs or less about datapoints like, simply speaking, "x is the capital of y and as of year has z inhabitants" is of course debatable as is whether AW can ever achieve much more than that (I'm not saying it definitely can't).
Especially with all this in mind, it's not wise to put all eggs in this one basket and not explore and work on alternative approaches. Doing so is not a good idea in general: if you just do one thing, put all resources and focus onto it, and it turns out to be far inferior to other approaches or more limited than these, then you may miss out on important innovations.
Thus, I recommend people interested in this project check out the proposal below. It could feasibly double Wikipedia readers/reads in a short time if implemented like proposed so I think it's important to consider or start some work on it. Two key aspects here are that articles can be found by people searching the Web (with DuckDuckGo, Google, etc) in their own language and that human editors can effectively correct flaws in translations. The image on the right summarizes the architecture but more details, better explanations, and basically a FAQ can be found on the page:
W78: Wikipedia Machine Translation Project
Prototyperspective (talk) 14:00, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
Abstract Wiki Architect: family-based NLG toolkit
[edit]I have developed a toolkit called Abstract Wiki Architect, a family-based NLG system that explores an architecture for industrial-scale renderers for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions (shared engines per language family, per-language JSON configs, a lexicon subsystem, and QA test suites). The code and documentation are available at https://github.com/Rejean-McCormick/abstract-wiki-architect.
The core architecture is in place and I am currently working through some remaining issues and tests before running broader cross-language suites. I would be interested in feedback from people working on constructors, renderers, lexica, or related tools, especially on how this architecture might align (or conflict) with current Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions designs.