Wikinotebooks
| Wikinotebooks | |
|---|---|
| Status of the proposal | |
| Status | under discussion |
| Details of the proposal | |
| Project description | A Wikinotebooks project would enable new, wiki-style, multi-user collaboration scenarios with respect to notebook-based computing in a way tightly integrated with the Wikimedia software ecosystem. |
| Is it a multilingual wiki? | Many language versions |
| Potential number of languages | Many |
| Proposed tagline | A Wiki for Computational Notebooks |
| Technical requirements | |
| New features to require | Coming soon |
Introduction[edit]
A Wikinotebooks project would enable new, wiki-style, multi-user collaboration scenarios with respect to notebook-based computing in a way tightly integrated with the Wikimedia software ecosystem.
Use cases[edit]
Multimedia generation[edit]
With notebook-based computing, multimedia resources could be generated by both people and AI systems, including: 3D graphics, animations, audio, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, images, infographics, maps, mathematical expressions, pictures, tables, text, and video.
Editors would be able to log on to Wikinotebooks, create a new notebook, query data from Wikidata, run some program logic (e.g., JavaScript, Lua, or Python) on that data to generate a chart or infographic, save it to Commons, and then add it to a Wikipedia article.
Computational notebooks would be stored on Wikinotebooks, generated multimedia resources would be stored on Commons, and these notebooks and multimedia resources would remain interconnected.
Persisted interconnectivity between data, structured queries, computational notebooks, and multimedia resources would allow features including data-binding, where updates to backing data on Wikidata would result in automatic updates to multimedia resources, e.g., charts or infographics, and/or in notifications to interested editors that new revisions or versions were available.
Artificial intelligence[edit]
Large language models, AI agents, and multi-agent systems could:
- be interacted with using computational notebooks.
- create and revise Wikinotebooks notebooks per their natural-language-generation and code-generation capabilities, e.g., creating multimedia resources on behalf of users or while conducting more intricate tasks such as generating multimedia encyclopedic content for users.
- contextually recommend hyperlinks to relevant software documentation and/or code-completions for editors.
Education[edit]
Computational notebooks can have educational applications.
Science and mathematics[edit]
Computational notebooks can be tools for science, mathematics, and research.
Data analysis and visualization[edit]
Computational notebooks can be tools for data analysis and visualization.
Interactive dashboards[edit]
Computational notebooks can be used to create and share interactive dashboards.
Discussion[edit]
[edit]
Computational notebooks, having both document and code cells, could:
- be edited, revised, and improved.
- have revision histories or changelogs.
- have accompanying talk pages, discussion pages, or structured forums for collaboration.
- be categorized and organized.
- be searched for, retrieved, and reused.
- hyperlink to one another and to other Wikimedia content.
- be invoked or consumed through wiki-templates with and without input parameters; output cells of computational notebooks could be included or transcluded into other wiki content, e.g., Wikipedia articles.
Other features[edit]
Computational notebooks could:
- be created using task-specific boilerplates or input forms.
- be forked, cloned, or copied.
- be imported from popular formats, e.g., the Jupyter notebooks format.
- be exported to popular formats, e.g., the Jupyter notebook format, to be downloaded by users.
Related projects[edit]
- DAGOBAH "aims at providing an end-to-end, context-free, semantic annotation system for tabular data, resulting in enriched knowledge graphs that users can then leverage on to meet several needs."
- Jupyter is "a large umbrella project that covers many different software offerings and tools, including the popular Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab web-based notebook authoring and editing applications. The Jupyter project and its subprojects all center around providing tools (and standards) for interactive computing with computational notebooks."
- Jupyter AI "brings generative AI to Jupyter. Jupyter AI provides a user-friendly and powerful way to explore generative AI models in notebooks and improve your productivity".
- Jupyter Lite is "a JupyterLab distribution that runs entirely in the browser built from the ground-up using JupyterLab components and extensions."
- LIDA is "a library for generating data visualizations and data-faithful infographics. LIDA is grammar agnostic (will work with any programming language and visualization libraries e.g. matplotlib, seaborn, altair, d3 etc) and works with multiple large language model providers (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, PaLM, Cohere, Huggingface)."
- OpenRefine is "a free data wrangling tool that can be used to process, manipulate and clean tabular (spreadsheet) data and connect it with knowledge bases."
- PAWS: A Web Shell (PAWS) is "a Jupyter notebook deployment hosted by Wikimedia."
- Differences between PAWS and the proposed Wikinotebooks project include, but are not limited to:
- intended userbases – PAWS is intended for users contributing to Wikimedia's technical projects and Wikinotebooks would be intended for a broader userbase contributing to its growing collection of computational notebooks and to other Wikimedia projects' multimedia contents.
- wiki integration – Wikinotebooks would be a wiki, integrated into wiki technologies, as mentioned above in the Discussion section.
- notebook formats – Wikinotebooks might use markdown or, perhaps, wikitext for notebooks' document cells.
- frontend concepts – Wikinotebooks' Web frontend would match other Wikimedia websites and would also be themeable and styleable.
- Differences between PAWS and the proposed Wikinotebooks project include, but are not limited to: