Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

Dear Ziko,

thank you for your thoughtful comments. My answers are inline.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 2:25 PM Ziko van Dijk  wrote:

> Dear Denny,
>
> Thank you for your well written piece with some very intriguing ideas. I
> have read most of it, and I must confess that I have not fully understand
> everything about keys and contractors. Maybe I am not exactly the target
> group.
>
> I found it very sympathetic to read your own scepticisms, and obviously we
> both have read the same book by Umberto Eco. :-)
>

I really love Eco's book on the topic, "The Search for a Perfect Language",
and I can recommend everyone to read it. It is sometimes a bit hard to find.


> Single point of failure: I am not that worried about that, according to the
> "many-eyball-principle".
>
> Single language wiki: This seems to me the biggest problem if your new wiki
> (wikis) is supposed to be a place where everybody can contribute,
> regardless of the native language. You think that "detailed discussions and
> debates" are less likely (in the beginning). Well, for any meaningful
> participation, would'nt it be important that everybody can communicate with
> everybody? Whether we would use one or several languages in the wiki, the
> language problem would be a limitation of the collaboration.
>
>
I actually do not think that this is crucial from the immediate beginning.
I mean, it obviously would be great if there was a way for all contributors
to be able to discuss everything from the start, but the lack of a solution
for this issue didn't stop us from creating Commons, Meta, nor Wikidata -
and two of these are among the most active projects we have.

If there is a "edit-war" like situation between contributors of different
language background, where the lack of a common language prevents a
productive discussion, there is always the option that they simply override
that part in their local Wikipedias with local content. Don't forget that
the content from Abstract Wikipedia is only used if a local community
decides to do so. So such disagreements can be avoided, even if not always
resolved.



> By the way, I think that a big part of the negative attitude, that many
> (German) Wikipedians have towards Wikidata, is based on language barriers.
>


If this were true, I would expect the same attitude from many other wikis
that do not speak English. But many other Wikipedians have embraced it. And
in fact, even among the German communities I have sensed much more openness
to collaboration and much more understanding between the projects in the
recent years than it used to be.

In short, I do not think that it was the language barrier that caused the
issues that have been there. After all, I have the feeling that the
Wikipedia with the strongest opposition to a measured used of Wikidata is
not the German, but the English one - and there the language barrier is
rather small, give or take the propensity for using Q-prefixed numbers in
otherwise understandable text.



> Another reason is that Wikipedians have build up their own status within
> Wikipedia, and when they come to Wikidata, they have to start from the
> beginning to build up status. The same problems we would we with regard to
> ("normal") Wikipedia on the one hand, and Abstract Wikipedia and
> Wikilambda, on the other hand, I guess? So these wikis would be in future
> linked to each other very much, but the different communities might not go
> along well.
>
>
Yes, this is correct. This is already the case for our projects, and in
fact, often also for the communities that have formed within the projects.



> Reducing knowledge diversity: I agree that that is not so much the problem,
> as the Wikipedians will decide which content to take over and which not.
> What I would like to see: That as a reader, I can get an article (e.g. "San
> Francisco") in different versions: a long one, a short one, one interesting
> for people who live in SF, etc. In general, more modularity than now would
> be great.
>
>
I agree, that would be quite awesome. And whereas I don't think this to be
an immediate goal, I do think that such a system will become *much* easier
when we have the content in an abstract format and can do summarizations or
choose different renderers for different audiences. For example, there
could be different renderer that is more suitable for children of different
ages, which keeps the readability-level in mind, or renderers geared toward
more lay audiences and others towards specialists. Some of these are easier
to do than others, but I see us working on these by 2024.



> "We must make sure that it does not become too hard to contribute": Yes,
> that is a big problem (see above). I like the idea of "outsourcing" skills;
> that the people of local Wikipedia can ask people on Abstract WP and
> Wikilambda. You would need enough volunteers on AWP-WL to help; and you
> would need at least some people on local WP who can communicate its wishes
> to the helpers on AWP-WL. For 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

Elevator pitch:

Many Wikipedia language editions have large gaps in knowledge. We want to
close these gaps by allowing to create and maintain content in one place
and allow the Wikipedias to use this content if they choose so, instead of
doing that in each of the Wikipedia language editions individually. This
will allow more people to access and create more knowledge in more
languages in the Wikipedias.

In order to do this, we need to represent the content in a way that can be
translated to many different natural languages with high fidelity. We do
this by introducing a new project that allows to create, maintain,
catalogue and evaluate functions as a new form of knowledge the communities
work on. This will allow completely new use cases, and allow more people to
share in more forms of knowledge than today.


On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 2:48 PM Andy Mabbett 
wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 01:52, Denny Vrandečić  wrote:
>
> > As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
> > Wikipedia for a few years now.
>
> What's the elevator pitch for this?
>
>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
> @pigsonthewing
> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Andy Mabbett]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 01:52, Denny Vrandečić  wrote:

> As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
> Wikipedia for a few years now.

What's the elevator pitch for this?


--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Ziko van Dijk]

Dear Denny,

Thank you for your well written piece with some very intriguing ideas. I
have read most of it, and I must confess that I have not fully understand
everything about keys and contractors. Maybe I am not exactly the target
group.

I found it very sympathetic to read your own scepticisms, and obviously we
both have read the same book by Umberto Eco. :-)

Single point of failure: I am not that worried about that, according to the
"many-eyball-principle".

Single language wiki: This seems to me the biggest problem if your new wiki
(wikis) is supposed to be a place where everybody can contribute,
regardless of the native language. You think that "detailed discussions and
debates" are less likely (in the beginning). Well, for any meaningful
participation, would'nt it be important that everybody can communicate with
everybody? Whether we would use one or several languages in the wiki, the
language problem would be a limitation of the collaboration.

By the way, I think that a big part of the negative attitude, that many
(German) Wikipedians have towards Wikidata, is based on language barriers.
Another reason is that Wikipedians have build up their own status within
Wikipedia, and when they come to Wikidata, they have to start from the
beginning to build up status. The same problems we would we with regard to
("normal") Wikipedia on the one hand, and Abstract Wikipedia and
Wikilambda, on the other hand, I guess? So these wikis would be in future
linked to each other very much, but the different communities might not go
along well.

Reducing knowledge diversity: I agree that that is not so much the problem,
as the Wikipedians will decide which content to take over and which not.
What I would like to see: That as a reader, I can get an article (e.g. "San
Francisco") in different versions: a long one, a short one, one interesting
for people who live in SF, etc. In general, more modularity than now would
be great.

"We must make sure that it does not become too hard to contribute": Yes,
that is a big problem (see above). I like the idea of "outsourcing" skills;
that the people of local Wikipedia can ask people on Abstract WP and
Wikilambda. You would need enough volunteers on AWP-WL to help; and you
would need at least some people on local WP who can communicate its wishes
to the helpers on AWP-WL. For very small WP communities, that would be an
enourmous challenge.

My personal approach would be the following, based on experiences with
German language encyclopedia for children, Klexikon. It would be great for
small Wikipedias to find a corpus of ca. 3000-5000 encyclopedic articles.
Well chosen by relevance for at least most parts of the world. In
easy-to-understand English, not too long, with a good strcuture, written in
a way that you can easily translate and adapt them for your own language.
(Many people will now say: "Simple English Wikipedia already exists", but I
think it is not there yet.)

Those 3000-5000 articles would be a wonderful encyclopedia already. The
local Wikipedians would enrich the content then with some hundred or
thousand articles of their own. In my experience, you do not need millions
of articles to fulfill the knowledge hunger of most readers.

I think that your "content translation framework" approach goes a little
bit into this direction. Part of the framework could be to make suggestions
about "localization". For example, the article about "Dogs" could have a
note saying: "After this paragraph, you could add some sentences with
regard to dogs in your own country/region."

Kind regards,
Ziko






















Am Di., 14. Apr. 2020 um 02:53 Uhr schrieb Denny Vrandečić <
vrande...@gmail.com>:

> As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
> Wikipedia for a few years now. Two other publications on this are here, I
> have bothered you with mails about it here previously too:
>
> https://research.google/pubs/pub48057/
>
> https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah
>
> I've also been giving talks about the topic in several places about this
> idea, some of them have also been recorded:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzVA7YLwhTE
>
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiJ6E9sG6U=PLQVG_tuf3Q2fji-CwqEDRJpZuf23wevrq=13
>
> I gathered some awesome feedback in those few years (also from some members
> of this list, thank you!), and I also implemented a few prototypes trying
> out the idea, learning a lot from that.
>
> All of this has helped to sharpen the idea and come up with a more concrete
> proposal. In short, the proposal is that we do a two-step approach: first,
> allow for capturing Wikipedia content in an abstract notation, and second,
> allow for creating functions that translate this abstract notation into
> natural language (For simplicity, I gave this two steps names, Abstract
> Wikipedia for step 1, and Wikilambda for step 2. I realize that both names
> are not perfect, but that is just one of the many things that we can figure
> out 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

Yay! Thanks for the positive note! This is appreciated!

Stay safe,
Denny

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 1:44 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Based on my first read-through of the paper, I think this would be
> something worth doing.
> Cheers,
> Peter.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Denny Vrandecic
> Sent: 14 April 2020 02:53
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new
> Wikipedia project
>
> As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
> Wikipedia for a few years now. Two other publications on this are here, I
> have bothered you with mails about it here previously too:
>
> https://research.google/pubs/pub48057/
>
> https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah
>
> I've also been giving talks about the topic in several places about this
> idea, some of them have also been recorded:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzVA7YLwhTE
>
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiJ6E9sG6U=PLQVG_tuf3Q2fji-CwqEDRJpZuf23wevrq=13
>
> I gathered some awesome feedback in those few years (also from some members
> of this list, thank you!), and I also implemented a few prototypes trying
> out the idea, learning a lot from that.
>
> All of this has helped to sharpen the idea and come up with a more concrete
> proposal. In short, the proposal is that we do a two-step approach: first,
> allow for capturing Wikipedia content in an abstract notation, and second,
> allow for creating functions that translate this abstract notation into
> natural language (For simplicity, I gave this two steps names, Abstract
> Wikipedia for step 1, and Wikilambda for step 2. I realize that both names
> are not perfect, but that is just one of the many things that we can figure
> out together on the way).
>
> I wrote up this proposal in a paper, which I uploaded to my Website almost
> two weeks ago, and I also submitted it to Arxiv. And as soon as it was
> published on Arxiv, I wanted to share it with you and see what you folks
> think (I wanted to wait for it as Arxiv would allow the URLs to remains
> table - my Website has gone down before and might so again).
>
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733
>
> The new proposal is much more concrete than the previous proposals (and
> therefore there is much more to criticize). Also, obviously, nothing of
> this is set in stone, and just like the names, I am very much looking
> forward to hear suggestions for how to improve the whole thing, and I will
> blatantly steal every good idea and proposal. I am not even sure what a
> good venue for this discussion is, I guess, eventually it should be on
> Meta?, but also about that I would like to hear proposals.
>
> Abstract Wikipedia is a proposed extension to Wikidata that would capture
> the content next to the Wikidata items. Think of it as a new namespace,
> where we could create, maintain, and collaborate on the abstract content.
> Similar to the Wikidata-bridge, there should be a way to allow
> contributions from the Wikipedias to flow back without too much friction.
> The individual Wikipedias - and I cannot stress this enough - have the
> choice to use some or any or all or none of the content from Abstract
> Wikipedia, but I most definitely do not expect the content of the current
> Wikipedias to be replaced by this. In fact, I have no doubt that any decent
> article in any language Wikipedia will remain superior to the outcome of
> the proposed new architecture by far. This is a proposal for the places
> where the current system left us with gaps, not a proposal to turn the
> parts that are already brilliant today dull and terrible tomorrow.
>
> Wikilambda is a proposed new Wikimedia project that allows us to share in a
> new form of knowledge assets, functions. You can think of it as similar to
> Modules or Templates, but a bit extended, with places for tests, different
> languages, evaluation, and also for all kind of functions, not only those
> that are immediately useful for one of the Wikimedia projects, and most
> importantly, shared among the projects. So one of the first goals would be
> to increasingly allow fo a place to have global templates, another idea
> that has been discussed and asked for for a very long time. Wikilambda,
> just as Wikidata, is expected to start as a project supporting the
> immediate needs of the sister projects, and over time to grow to a project
> that stands on its own merits as well.
>
> We don't really have an effective process for starting new projects, so I
> am trying to follow a similar path that we took for Wikidata back then. And
> back then it all started with Markus Krötzsch, me and others talking about
> the idea to anyone who would listen until everyone was bored of hearing it,
> trying out prototypes, and then talking about it even more, and improving
> all of it constantly based on your feedback. And then making 

[Wikimedia-l] #1Lib1Ref (virtual) starting May 2020!

[Felix Nartey]

Librarians and library lovers,

We hope that you and your loved ones are taking care during this
challenging time for the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected
countless aspects of our personal and professional lives, and the Wikimedia
Foundation is sending our very best wishes to all of you.

Equitable access to reliable, unbiased information has never been more
important. From *May 15th to June 5th*, we will be running the global
#1Lib1Ref campaign (virtually), with a focus on improving and increasing
the quality of content for the billions of people staying at home during
the public health crisis. As you may know, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia
projects have seen record-breaking pageviews in the last few weeks,
reflecting that people around the world are turning to us for trustworthy
information.[1]

With that in mind, this is a critical time to bring librarians and
Wikimedia together: more people are reading and learning from the web, and
we need to strengthen trust in our content through citations. Join us as we
do that, by helping us organize to encourage library communities to add one
more citation to Wikipedia.

What can you do?

We are advising everyone to follow WHO health guidelines
 and not
conduct in-person events. Instead, we will organize virtually, and we have
created recommendations for online meetings! Please share your digital
events so #1Lib1Ref contributors can join you

!

You can visit our resource page

for  guides on how to virtually participate in the campaign.  Ensure your
contribution is recorded by using the #1Lib1Ref hashtag in your edit summary.
This is very important for us to monitor the reach and success of the
initiative.

Let us know if you need new kinds of support

We know that with the COVID-19 pandemic, it's not as easy to participate in
volunteer activities or organizing online activities.  Many of us are
focusing on our families, figuring our homeschooling and working remotely,
and responding to the demands of the crisis in other ways.  We also know
that certain parts of the library sector are facing difficult challenges,
such as layoffs, increased work, or extreme changes in work.

We want to know how the pandemic may affect your ability to participate in
#1Lib1Ref, as well as how we can support you better in this unprecedented
situation. Please fill out this short survey

to help us better understand how to support you during this round!

Join our communications!

You can join the 1Lib1Ref community via the Libraries (
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As we get closer to the launch of the campaign next month, we will update
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#1Lib1Ref. Stay tuned for updates on this page
.

Looking forward to #1Lib1Ref!

You can learn about last year's campaign and what we learned in our
recently-released blog post at Medium



Lastly, to learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation’s response to
COVID-19, please visit wikimediafoundation.org/covid19.

Sincerely,


[1] -
https://tools.wmflabs.org/siteviews/?platform=all-access=pageviews=user=latest-90=all-projects

-- 
*Felix Nartey*
*Library Outreach Coordinator*
*Wikimedia Foundation *
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] New board of Wikimedia Norge

[Jon Harald Søby]

Hi Lukas! Sorry, I just noticed your email from before Easter – sorry about
missing it. In the meantime I got the same question from Gesine who you
probably know, so I'm just forwarding my answer to her below. :-)

-- Forwarded message -
Fra: Jon Harald Søby 
Date: tir. 14. apr. 2020 kl. 12:04
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] New board of Wikimedia Norge
To: Gesine Marks 
Cc: Moritz Rahm 


Hi Gesine & Moritz!

I think our scales are very different, so I'm not sure how applicable our
experience will be for WMDE. If I remember correctly, you regularly have up
to 200–300 participants at the general assemblies, but we have much less –
for the last ~5 years we have had between 15 and 30 participants. For this
online GA, only 13 people showed up, and we didn't really expect more than
around ~20 people max, so the scale was easy to manage for us.

If you aren't already a member of it, I think you should ask about this in
the Telegram group "CROW – Conference Remote Options for Wikimedians" at
https://t.me/joinchat/FE0P5FlfxzREOMlLljnNcA – it also has a coordinating
page on Meta at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_remote_event_participation with
some collected information about various options.

tir. 14. apr. 2020 kl. 11:12 skrev Gesine Marks :

>
> Dear Jon,
>
> Thanks for keeping us in the loop! We are in the midst of dicussing
> options re our assembly. We may go for the digital version as well. Could
> you help us with your experience as we are not so sure about the best
> software and tools yet. We are currently looking into zoom & co, but feel
> not very comfortable about data privacy and security.
>
> Would you mind sharing your insights with us, either by call or in
> written? That would be highly appreciated.
>
> Thaks so much in advance! Looking forward to hearing from you I remain
>
> With best regards
>
> Gesine
>

fre. 3. apr. 2020 kl. 20:21 skrev Lukas Mezger :

> Dear Jon,
>
> Thank you for these news and congratulations to the new Wikimedia Norge
> board!
>
> Would it be possible to share some technical background information and
> lessons learned from the virtual meeting? A lot of affiliates including
> Wikimedia Deutschland are currently facing this challenge as well.
> Kind regards,
>
> Lukas
>
> --
>
> Dr. Lukas Mezger
> Vorsitzender des Präsidiums / chair of the Supervisory Board
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
> Tel. (030) 219 158 260 – (0151) 268 63 931
> http://wikimedia.de
>
> Bleiben Sie auf dem neuesten Stand! Aktuelle Nachrichten und spannende
> Geschichten rund um Wikimedia, Wikipedia und Freies Wissen im Newsletter:
> Zur
> Anmeldung .
>
> Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
> Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
> http://spenden.wikimedia.de
>
> Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
> Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
> der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
> Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207
>
> Am Fr., 3. Apr. 2020 um 18:03 Uhr schrieb Camelia Boban <
> camelia.bo...@gmail.com>:
>
> > Thanks for sharing Jon and congratulatons to Wikimedia Norge for the new
> > board .
> >
> > Best,
> > Camelia
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > *Camelia Boban*
> >
> > *| Java EE Developer |*
> >
> >
> >
> > *Affiliations Committee - **Wikimedia Foundation*
> > Diversity WG for Wikimedia Strategy 2030
> > *Interwiki Women
> >  | **Wiki
> > Loves Sport  | Wiki
> > Loves
> > Fashion *
> > WMIT  - WMSE
> >  - WMAR
> >  - WMCH
> >  Member
> >
> > M. +39 3383385545
> > camelia.bo...@gmail.com
> > *Aissa Technologies* * | *Twitter
> >  *|* *LinkedIn
> > *
> > *Wikipedia  **|
> > **WikiDonne
> > UG * | *WikiDonne Project
> >  *
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Il giorno ven 3 apr 2020 alle ore 14:03 Tito Dutta 
> > ha
> > scritto:
> >
> > > Namaskara,
> > > Thanks for the notification. Good wishes to the (new) board members,
> and
> > > all the members of Wikimedia Norge for the upcoming year.
> > > Thanks
> > > Tito Dutta
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Fri, 3 Apr 2020 at 17:24, Jon Harald Søby 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > Wikimedia Norge held its general assembly on Saturday, March 14th,
> for
> > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Peter Southwood]

Based on my first read-through of the paper, I think this would be something 
worth doing. 
Cheers, 
Peter.

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Denny Vrandecic
Sent: 14 April 2020 02:53
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new 
Wikipedia project

As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
Wikipedia for a few years now. Two other publications on this are here, I
have bothered you with mails about it here previously too:

https://research.google/pubs/pub48057/

https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah

I've also been giving talks about the topic in several places about this
idea, some of them have also been recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzVA7YLwhTE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiJ6E9sG6U=PLQVG_tuf3Q2fji-CwqEDRJpZuf23wevrq=13

I gathered some awesome feedback in those few years (also from some members
of this list, thank you!), and I also implemented a few prototypes trying
out the idea, learning a lot from that.

All of this has helped to sharpen the idea and come up with a more concrete
proposal. In short, the proposal is that we do a two-step approach: first,
allow for capturing Wikipedia content in an abstract notation, and second,
allow for creating functions that translate this abstract notation into
natural language (For simplicity, I gave this two steps names, Abstract
Wikipedia for step 1, and Wikilambda for step 2. I realize that both names
are not perfect, but that is just one of the many things that we can figure
out together on the way).

I wrote up this proposal in a paper, which I uploaded to my Website almost
two weeks ago, and I also submitted it to Arxiv. And as soon as it was
published on Arxiv, I wanted to share it with you and see what you folks
think (I wanted to wait for it as Arxiv would allow the URLs to remains
table - my Website has gone down before and might so again).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733

The new proposal is much more concrete than the previous proposals (and
therefore there is much more to criticize). Also, obviously, nothing of
this is set in stone, and just like the names, I am very much looking
forward to hear suggestions for how to improve the whole thing, and I will
blatantly steal every good idea and proposal. I am not even sure what a
good venue for this discussion is, I guess, eventually it should be on
Meta?, but also about that I would like to hear proposals.

Abstract Wikipedia is a proposed extension to Wikidata that would capture
the content next to the Wikidata items. Think of it as a new namespace,
where we could create, maintain, and collaborate on the abstract content.
Similar to the Wikidata-bridge, there should be a way to allow
contributions from the Wikipedias to flow back without too much friction.
The individual Wikipedias - and I cannot stress this enough - have the
choice to use some or any or all or none of the content from Abstract
Wikipedia, but I most definitely do not expect the content of the current
Wikipedias to be replaced by this. In fact, I have no doubt that any decent
article in any language Wikipedia will remain superior to the outcome of
the proposed new architecture by far. This is a proposal for the places
where the current system left us with gaps, not a proposal to turn the
parts that are already brilliant today dull and terrible tomorrow.

Wikilambda is a proposed new Wikimedia project that allows us to share in a
new form of knowledge assets, functions. You can think of it as similar to
Modules or Templates, but a bit extended, with places for tests, different
languages, evaluation, and also for all kind of functions, not only those
that are immediately useful for one of the Wikimedia projects, and most
importantly, shared among the projects. So one of the first goals would be
to increasingly allow fo a place to have global templates, another idea
that has been discussed and asked for for a very long time. Wikilambda,
just as Wikidata, is expected to start as a project supporting the
immediate needs of the sister projects, and over time to grow to a project
that stands on its own merits as well.

We don't really have an effective process for starting new projects, so I
am trying to follow a similar path that we took for Wikidata back then. And
back then it all started with Markus Krötzsch, me and others talking about
the idea to anyone who would listen until everyone was bored of hearing it,
trying out prototypes, and then talking about it even more, and improving
all of it constantly based on your feedback. And then making increasingly
concrete proposals until we managed to show some kind of consensus from the
communities, you, and the Foundation to actually do it. And then, well, do
it.

So, I've done some of the talking, with researchers, with the public, with
some of you, and also with folks at the Foundation, to figure out what next