Wikifunctions:Project chat

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Does anyone know what the problem with this implementation is? JJP_Master (she/they) 21:14, 18 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

There is a bug that doesn't allow Python implementation to return nested lists. Dv103 (talk) 05:31, 19 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

Is there a Phabricator task for this? Searching through them is hell. — rae^5e <talk> 03:22, 20 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

A bit of time ago I opened phab:T392750, which is very similar to this issue. Dv103 (talk) 05:26, 20 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

I don’t think there is a general problem with returning nested lists. There is a problem with not taking into account the declared type for a nested list, which is an issue only for types with custom conversion. There is an equivalent issue on the input side, applicable to all “generic types” that are nested, including typed lists: phab:T417266. GrounderUK (talk) 11:39, 16 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

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

In this issue, we introduce our first function to import images on Abstract Wikipedia, we present our Functions of the Week, 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 June 8, at 17:30 UTC (link to the meeting).

Enjoy the reading! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 14:14, 5 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello. I would like to be able to use the function subject is instance of (string) (Z26039) to generate sentences like "the Eiffel Tower is a monument" or "la torre Eiffel es un monumento" in Spanish. It already raises a lot of questions.

Question 1: I should be able to set the first input "entity" to Eiffel Tower (Q243) and the second input "class" to monument (Q4989906) and get the correct sentence, shouldn't I? Just checking.

Question 2: subject is instance of (string) (Z26039) calls a language-specific function like "Spanish article-less instantiating sentence" Spanish article-less instantiating sentence (Z26337), which uses the label of the Wikidata item to get the text for "Eiffel Tower", which is similar to the lemma of the lexeme. But this would not be acceptable in production, would it? The item label "belongs" to all Wikidata users, not to Abstract Wikipedia users, and there is no guarantee what it might contain, such as a parenthesis for disambiguation. Or am I wrong?

Question 3a: We need to have a lexeme for the combination "Eiffel Tower" in each language, don't we? For instance in languages with gender, the lexeme is the only place to find the gender. It is true that if we know that the equivalent of "Tower" is the head word, syntactical information can be found under the lexeme for "tower", and it would be good to use a system like that. But the only place that the syntactic dependency information could be located is under the lexeme.

Question 3b: At present for subject is instance of (string) (Z26039) etc. to work, we have to add any forms or syntax information to the lexeme of the whole phrase, such as "Eiffel Tower". But property combines lexemes (P5238) with attributes syntactic dependency head relationship (P9763) and syntactic dependency head position (P9764) can be used to define the structure and avoid duplicating the syntax information. What lexeme would be used for "Eiffel" in this case? Would it be the same as a lexeme for Gustave Eiffel (Q20882)? That makes no sense to me. I propose that there should be a dummy lexeme in each language which could be added to combines lexemes (P5238) instead of a real lexeme to mean "invariant element".

Question 4: As has already been pointed out elsewhere, the fragment functions do not work well with the initial definite article in languages like English, Spanish and German. Examples:

• "The Eiffel Tower is a monument." The item label "Eiffel Tower" omits the article and so the result omits the initial "The" in English. French, Spanish and German are similar.
• "The Sun is a star." Similarly the article is wrongly omitted, also in French, Spanish and German.
• "Westminster Abbey is a monument." This is OK in English and German as no article is needed, but not in French or Spanish where it is, for instance "La Abadía de Westminster es un monumento".
• "Latin is a dead language." Also this is OK in English and German but not in French or Spanish, where an article is needed.
• "Jupiter is a planet.". This does not need an article and is OK in all the languages; I include this to show that you cannot assume that there is an article in all cases in French and Spanish.

How should the language functions find out whether an article is needed? In some cases, where the lemma is a phrase like "Abadía de Westminster" in Spanish, I think that it could be deduced, but in general there is no rule to give the answer. Using different rendering functions according to the case is not a solution, although it might work for a few specific languages like these four. It would not be acceptable because there will be many, many other cases of syntactical choices to be made for all the different languages, and we cannot expect the person writing the abstract code to take them all into account. So I suppose that a declaration in the lexeme is needed to solve this problem. I suppose that there must already be linguistic terminology for this problem, but I don't know it.

I would be grateful for any comments on any of these questions. Strobilomyces (talk) 15:02, 5 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Strobilomyces I think this topic is better placed at Abstract Wikipedia:Project chat, so I copied your topic there, and answered it there too. HenkvD (talk) 22:07, 8 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

OK, sorry about that. Strobilomyces (talk) 17:03, 9 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

1. Yes.

2. It depends on the language, but it is no bad thing if the subject of the sentence recapitulates the article title, ideally shorn of disambiguators. The difficulty is that item labels and article titles are simply text, so there is no guarantee that they can be parsed sufficiently well in any given language.

3a. Conceptually, this is true, but we must assume that it won’t happen. That means we have to construct the lexeme for any given language, and this will be discussed at the Wikifunctions:NLG SIG#Upcoming meeting on Tuesday. In the special case where the item’s linguistic form is consistently some kind of modified head noun, it may be appropriate to capture this as a qualified subclass of (P279) relationship (the Eiffel Tower is classed as a monument but named as a tower, for example).

3b. It’s complicated, yes, but I believe all this needs to be considered as part of the above mentioned lexeme-construction process.

4. Yes, this is a stubborn problem, being partly context and partly custom. In English, the general rule is that names resist determiners. That implies the need to distinguish names from other proper nouns. “Mercury” is a name but “sun” and “moon” are ordinary nouns made proper by the definite article (although, exceptionally, this may be elided for “the Earth”, presumably influenced by the Sun’s other planets having names). More generally, as has been noted, the rules vary by language, so the distinction must be made at that level. The general rule for a particular language would typically apply according to the item’s class (country, language, construction…) but per-language exceptions are a case for lexicographic properties (because they are details exposed by Wikifunctions but required more generally, like the fact that, even when abbreviated, “the USA” and “the UK” require the definite article, whereas most countries have names that resist it). GrounderUK (talk) 10:46, 14 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

See also Wikifunctions:Status updates/2026-06-19#The or not the, this is (the?) question. HenkvD (talk) HenkvD (talk) 11:38, 19 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello community,

The Wikimedia Foundation has provided a single legal and safety contact page, to be linked in the footer of your wiki, to ensure access to accurate legal information. This is a regulatory requirement.

We have already rolled out links to English, German, Italian, Spanish Wikipedias and other wikis and we will deploy to your wiki soon.

Please read more on the project page and leave any comments in this thread or on the talk page. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 9 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

example text at translatewiki.net Arlo Barnes (talk) 19:32, 19 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Arlo Barnes thank you! –– STei (WMF) (talk) 19:27, 24 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello, Wikifunctions says it uses the Apache 2.0 license for code. Apache 2.0 is incompatible with GPLv2 only and some other licenses, and I would like to be able to use Wikifunctions with software that uses incompatible licenses with Apache 2.0. Is there any plans to fix this incompatibility or relicense Wikifunctions code? Thanks! A random Wikipedian in the billions (talk) 11:49, 12 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

@A random Wikipedian in the billions: No. The licence was picked very carefully based on the way it needs to integrate with other systems, principally Wikipedias and Wikidata. Changing the licence would ba a major, breaking undertaking. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 11:52, 12 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

Just out of curiousity: what software would you like to use it with? Feeglgeef (talk) 23:19, 12 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

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)Reply

Hello! There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities during the last weekend of June. Both sessions will focus on the English Wikipedia Editor Reflections project. The featured guest in the Café will be User:Clovermoss. Participants may attend either or both sessions.

1. 27 June 2026 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe
2. 28 June 2026 03:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific

Please see the Café page for more information, including how to register!

↠Pine (✉) 03:55, 15 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello, I created a function (Z36415)

I thought it would be in my user namespace because I put a prefix in the name. However, putting prefixes in the name didn't work for functions and I created it globally. Is there any way to rename it or remove it?.

A random Wikipedian in the billions (talk) 12:08, 15 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

WF:RFD please. Sandbox-Function (Z8) (Z10119) is available if you need to do testing. Feeglgeef (talk) 12:10, 15 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! A random Wikipedian in the billions (talk) 12:17, 15 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

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)Reply

We also have two Functions, item indicates definite article, English (Z32645) and item indicates zero article, English (Z32935), which both aim to answer whether an Item needs a definite article or not [...] but neither of these seem to be integrated into the ways that Functions are actually used on Abstract Wikipedia, as can be seen e.g. on the article for the Eiffel Tower.

One of the connected Implementations uses it for the subject and location, and the other uses it for the location only. There was no heuristic in Z32645 for buildings, so I added a new Implementation with an extra branch, but even my optimised subclass checks for buildings are timing out. YoshiRulz (talk) 05:03, 20 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

I am not familiar with english rules for it. In German I am not able to explain a rule working every time about how to decide if an article is needed before a noun or not. So I think it is a case where it is better to look at such cases and then let a user with knwoledge in the language decide what is the correct function for a specific language. From my point of view it can be helpful to modify the functions to make a user based modification afterwards easier. This can be maybe done through optional arguments what give the possibility to modify specific forms if necessary without the necessity to fill it out every time a function is used. From my point of view the question raised in the newsletter shows how important the check of the output through an language speaker with an advanced level of understanding is. Languages can include complicated rules or exemptions what are necessary to pay attention and hard to implement in code without deep knwoledge of an language. At the moment I prefer language specific large functions generating whole sections of articles. As it seems to me difficult to implement the edge cases of every language in the language specific fragment functions. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:11, 21 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

Did you mean to reply to me? Letting those with [knowledge] in the language decide what is the correct function for a specific language is exactly what the current prototypes do. The functions I linked to are English-specific.
The multilingual function can't take a "use definite article" parameter for obvious reasons, and if you want the language-specific functions to take extra parameters like that, the multilingual function would then need to derive the correct values to be able to call them. Might as well keep that logic within the language-specific functions. YoshiRulz (talk) 20:34, 21 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

If I reply here with the modern discussion form I have not seen when I wrote the message how to change it to not reply to you when I want to add the section below your reply. What I wrote have been general thoughts about the topic. I think it should be possible to write functions with optional arguments. The modification of the article is language specific and so such a thing would modify the language specific function. What you wrote about calling them from the multilingual function is important. I hope it will be possible to find a solution for it without the need of adding all function arguments. Hogü-456 (talk) 17:22, 22 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

You are invited to participate in a request for comment on Wikimedia Commons about a policy update for AI content. This may affect files that are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for use on this project. Thank you. Codename Noreste (talk) 17:11, 23 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

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)Reply

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)Reply