Wikifunctions is a new site that has been added to the list of sites operated by WMF. I definitely see uses for it in automating updates on Wikipedia and bots (and also for programmers to reference), but their goal is to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic information. I have mixed feelings about this, as I don’t like existing programs that automatically generate articles (see the Cebuano and Dutch Wikipedias), and I worry that the system will be too complicated for average people.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
    11·
    8 months ago

    Note: I’ll clip the quotes for succinctness.

    Of course you do. […]

    You can’t leave those things to the abstraction layer because how different languages map abstract concepts differs, so there’s no way to factor them into generic language-specific components. The writer will need to tag things down, to minimal details, for the sake of languages that they don’t care about. It ends like that story about a map so large that it represents the terrain accurately being as big as the terrain, thus useless.

    For writing a story or prose, I agree. […]

    As I said in the reply to the other poster, the first pronoun is an example. This issue affects languages as a whole, and sometimes in ways that you can’t arbitrate through a fixed writing style because they convey meaning. (For example: if you don’t encode the social gender into the 3rd person pronouns, English breaks.)

    If your article talks about the concept of a living pig in some way and in the context of that article, it doesn’t matter whether the flesh is included, then you simply use the default word/phrase that the language uses to convey the concept of a pig. […]

    Often there’s no such thing as the “default”. The example with pig/pork is one of those cases - if whoever is writing the article doesn’t account for the fact that English uses two concepts (pig vs. pork) for what Spanish uses one (cerdo = puerco etc.), and assumes the default (“pig”), you’ll end with stuff like *“pig consumption has increased” (i.e. “pork consumption has decreased”). And the abstraction layer has no way to know if the human is talking about some living animal or its flesh.

    And context doesn’t help much because pork and pigs are mentioned often in the same articles.

    If it did matter, you’d explicitly describe the concept of “a living pig with its flesh” instead of the more generic concept of a living pig.

    As I said in the top, you’ll end with a “map” that is as large as the “terrain”, thus useless. (Or: spending way more effort explicitly describing all concepts that it’s simply easier to translate it by hand.)

    The project isn’t useless, mind you. Perhaps not surprisingly, it could be usable for small things in highly controlled situations, like tables; OP themself hinted this usage.

    But as much as I avoid doing “hard” statements about future tech, I’m fairly certain that it won’t be viable as a way to write full articles in a language-agnostic way.