Welcome to Wikifunctions

https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Main_Page

by edward • 3 years ago

307 157 3 years ago

wikifunctions.org

userbinator3• 3 years ago

There is a link on the main page titled "Decolonizing Functions", which leads to...

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_...

I'm not sure if that is satire, or for that matter this whole site.

abathologist• 3 years ago

That page seems totally reasonable and admirable to me. It’s literally just advocating for including the wide and varied history of algorithm development, in order to encourage readers from many different backgrounds to find ways to connect with the important topic.

userbinator3• 3 years ago

What exactly do you mean by "to find ways to connect with the important topic"? That sort of obfuscated language doesn't help explain anything.

Levitz3• 3 years ago

It’s literally just advocating for including the wide and varied history of algorithm development, in order to encourage readers from many different backgrounds to find ways to connect with the important topic.

I'm at a loss of words for what I feel towards respecting (even promoting!) the idea that a piece of knowledge ought to become interesting or valuable if there is ethnic relationship to it. It reeks of supremacist talk to me.

If someone came up to me saying that he got into mathematics because Charles Babbage was a white guy, just like him, I'd think that person doesn't belong in current society. This doesn't change if the person belongs to any minority.

js85• 3 years ago

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation. Basically, you don't understand that "decolonization" is a metaphor for a broader historical perspective, and instead you're trying to interpret it literally and in a bad faith.

userbinator3• 3 years ago

The only ones talking about "decolonization" are on one very extreme side of the political spectrum and trying to inject identity politics into everything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33607032

raincole• 3 years ago

People also got mad at Git for having default branch named master.

johnnyworker2• 3 years ago

What "outrage"? Might as well ask why you are going insane with hatred over a simple question. How would that feel? Would you even bother to respond to something like that?

nonethewiser7• 3 years ago

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation.

The reaction is more similar to people who ARENT bothered by the use of kill, master, etc. The article about “decolonizing” functions is a shoehorned idealogical venture. A completely unnecessary political aside.

I also wouldnt call it outrage. That just seems like a way to make the point sound unreasonable without addressing its logic. If his reaction is outrage then so yours.

soared• 3 years ago

first, to recognize the contributions of people with diverse backgrounds, in order to offer more protagonists who can inspire and with whom more people can identify second, to provide examples and motivations that are relatable to under-represented backgrounds and identities, in order to reach and be more immediately helpful to more people

Seems pretty reasonable IMO. Feels like pretty mellow and easy actions to take. But the linked post I agree is a bit … condescending? Self congratulating?

noaoh• 3 years ago

https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code is a similar website for people interested in this sort of thing

20after4• 3 years ago

WikiFunctions, I believe, has a larger purpose in the context of Wikimedia wikis, and that is they are building a library of functions that can be called directly from wikitext and the code will be evaluated automatically when the page is rendered.

I think the idea is to provide an easy way to embed dynamic content into the text of a Wikipedia article. This should provide a nice compliment to the way WikiData is used to dynamically insert data into articles.

Note: I worked for the Wikimedia foundation in the past, however, I wasn't involved with WikiFunctions. I just have some vague memories of internal product planning discussions about the feature.

atdt2• 3 years ago

The ability to invoke functions from wikitext and interpolate the result into the rendered page has been a feature of Wikipedia for over 17 years[1]. The ability to write custom functions in Lua was rolled out a decade ago[2].

  [1]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/2MMGKQV5EDDXR27RLQVCZ6TCYIXK2R24/
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lua

itishappy• 3 years ago

We are not competing with sites such as gist, or sites such as rosettacode.org, esolangs.org, or helloworldcollection.de, where code snippets are collected either to share them quickly with others or around a specific theme in different programming languages.

https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu...

TekMol2• 3 years ago

What are the holes in the namespace?

    https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z1 is about "Type: Object"
    https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z2 is about "Type: Persistent object"
    https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z10 404
    https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z100 404
    https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z500 is about "Error type: Unspecified error"
    https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z1000 404
    https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z10000 is about "Function: join strings"

quiddity2• 3 years ago

Many of the built-ins are currently turned off, whilst the team continues configuring things and bug-fixing.

The intended built-ins are listed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Reserved_...

There are more interesting examples of some user-made functions at the Older Beta-deployment location the team has been using for the past year: https://wikifunctions.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Ma...

4mitkumar• 3 years ago

Wow... Would this collection be helpful as a free and curated source of coding blocks to train future LLMs on?

nottheengineer• 3 years ago

Probably, but LLMs seem to gain more understanding from seeing lots of different examples than they do from a few examples of good code so people won't stop scraping stackoverflow.

bestcoder69• 3 years ago

Is this a bet against LLMs?

easeout• 3 years ago

Doesn't seem that way. I think it's a way to collect high quality information for humans, but LLMs can still benefit as a side effect.

hobofan• 3 years ago

No, the concept of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia has been brewing for some years. It's basically an extension/complement to Wikidata and the efforts to collect as much information as possible on Wikipedia in a language-agnostic way.

nologic014• 3 years ago

The documentation doesn't quite match the ambition of the project which may complicate the onboarding of new contributions

Some suggestions for immediate questions that people might want to see on a landing page:

* How does the function collection relate to existing function libraries in various programming languages

* What are the target domain and range of the function set, i.e., what is the overall scope of the project. Even if its open ended it needs some meaningful and self-explanaory scheme to categorize and group them

* What are some gee-wow uses. Why should one be involved. How can this be used outside wikipedia etc

mormegil2• 3 years ago

Yes, I think a pointer to somewhere like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia or around (possibly under https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Abstract_Wikipedia) should be here.

Also I'd say one of the more important pages here is actually https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu...

starkparker8• 3 years ago

Also, from the well-buried FAQ:[1]

In the future:
* It will be possible to call Wikifunctions functions from other Wikimedia projects, and integrate their results in the output of the page.
* It will be possible to use data from Wikidata in functions.
* It will be possible to call data sets from Commons Data namespace.

Everything right now is just transparency about the project's immaturity and publicly alpha-testing actual use cases.[2][3][4]

1: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:FAQ/en

2: All open tickets on Wikilambda, the stack behind Wikifunctions: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/?project=PHID-PR...

3: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/abstract-wikiped... — "We encountered a number of issues while deploying, and it was fascinating to fix these live while the community was watching. There are still a number of high-priority bugs, and we need to fix those before we get to the next step. The current plan is to open the wiki for editing on Tuesday, August 1st 2023, and we’ll update you if that changes."

4: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2...

starkparker8• 3 years ago

There are no reasons for public users to contribute; editing is locked to trusted, hand-selected users given temporary permissions.[1] The lack of documentation and purpose are arguably intentional because they're targeting internal uses. A large-scale, alpha-quality solution still looking for any non-Wikimedia Foundation problem to solve, made public mostly because Wikimedia prefers to be and enjoys being messy in public.

1: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Apply_for_e...

mg2• 3 years ago

What is everyone's favorite function / formula?

Mine is

    n/(n+x)

It has a bunch of interesting aspects:

    As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1.
    
    When n equals x, it is 0.5

    As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller

    For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal.

Say somebody told you about a new cafe in town and that it is completely awesome. The best cafe ever. What probability do you assign to it really being an exceptionally awesome cafe? If your x is 3, then the probability after one person praised it is 25%:

    1/(1+3) = 0.25

And if another person told you about that cafe being awesome, the probability becomes 40%:

   2/(2+3) = 0.4

And after 3 people told you the cafe is awesome, chances are 50% it really is:

   3/(3+3) = 0.5

The changes in probability are pretty strong at the beginning. But after 1000 people reported about the awesome cafe, the next report makes almost no difference anymore. It only ups the probability from 0.997008 to 0.997011.

By changing x from 3 to 4, your formula becomes more "suspicious", by changing it from 3 to 2, it becomes more "gullible".

I wonder if this formula has a name already. If not, "the trust formula" might be a candidate.

anonymous_sorry• 3 years ago

Doesn't quite work. If nobody has told you about the cafe, the probability that it is awesome should not be zero.

Perhaps you only define the trust function from n=1+

mg2• 3 years ago

Good point! The formula indeed assumes a base probability of zero. That's actually why I put "The best cafe ever" in there and that it is called an "exceptionally awesome cafe". I got a bit lax later in the text just calling it "awesome".

For a cafe aficionado, who spends most of their time in cafes, reading HN and thinking about formulas, the probability that some random cafe becomes their new favorite is virtually zero.

In other words: The more cafes you already know, the closer to zero the chance that a random one will be the best of them all.

So yeah, it is a formula for cafe lovers. Not for the casual person who is happy with a random filtered coffee swill from the vending machine. Those would have to add a base probability, turning the formula into something like b+n/(n+x)*(1-b).

Rayhem• 3 years ago

Interesting philosophical question: is awesomeness intrinsic or extrinsic (a matter of perception)? Can anything be intrinsic?

If it's intrinsic, then yes, the probability that it is awesome should not be zero if you've never heard of it. It's awesomeness exists independently of any measurement. But, by definition, you can't know it's awesomeness until you measure it, so awesomeness quotients only matter after they've been measured. And a measured value value must be expressible/observable outside the system (i.e. extrinsic).

ajtulloch• 3 years ago

One way to view this formula is to use the fact that the Beta distribution is a conjugate prior for the binomial distribution.

Essentially if you have a Beta(a, b) prior then your prior mean is a/(a+b) and after observing n samples from a Bernoulli distribution that are all positive, your posterior is Beta(a+n, b) with posterior mean (a+n)/(a+n+b). So in your example you effectively have a Beta(0, x) prior and x (“suspicious”/“gullible”) is directly interpreted as the strength of your prior!

svalorzen• 3 years ago

Also, in case anyone is interested, the uninformative Jeffreys prior for this in Bayesian statistics (meaning it does not assume anything and is invariant to certain transformations of the inputs) is Beta(0.5, 0.5). Thus the initial guess is 0.5, and it evolves from there from the data.

TekMol2• 3 years ago

Can this way to view the formula be expressed without the terms

    beta distribution
    conjugate
    prior
    binomial distribution
    bernoulli distribution
    posterior

Because I could easily grasp that it is a "trust formula" in the way mg described it. But this way to "view" the formula is a mistery to me.

jackphilson• 3 years ago

I think the jump from 1->2 ppl telling me it's the greatest cafe ever is a bigger jump than the jump from 0->1. Thus I think it would be more like a logarithmic curve.

Jap2-0• 3 years ago

This isn't the same formula, but the concept is a bit reminiscent of https://steamdb.info/blog/steamdb-rating/

keithalewis• 3 years ago

The Weierstrass ℘-function. It is what your function wants to be when it grows up.

vorticalbox• 3 years ago

How do you pick "x"?

BSEdlMMldESB2• 3 years ago

you pass it in?

it looks like it is a two argument function

jmye2• 3 years ago

I’m with you - I easily see how it affects the formula, but I’m not clear on how you decide what the right value, or range of values would be.

patmorgan23• 3 years ago

Based on the application/your experience.

badtension• 3 years ago

This reminds me of a simple algorithm to determine which product to choose if all have similar ratings but varying number of votes - add one positive and one negative review and recalculate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8idr1WZ1A7Q

eterevsky• 3 years ago

I would view this as Laplace smoothing or Additive smoothing for binary distributions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_smoothing). I use it all the time when I'm working estimating rates of some events from a limited amount of samples.

forgotpwd16• 3 years ago

Initially thought this project was about formulas.

pcnix• 3 years ago

This is similar to calculating probability from an odds ratio - if x = 1 and if n = your odds ratio, p = n/(n+1)

A neat explainer for how this helps with Bayesian updates (which is the update in trust that you're describing) is here - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-ar...

wilg• 3 years ago

I love the idea of having a wiki-based spec for the best implementation and/or algorithm that has a bangin' talk page and I can generally trust for most situations.

guy982387102• 3 years ago

Wikifunctions is primarily intended to support Wikimedia projects, especially Abstract Wikipedia. It is the code complement to Wikidata lexemes. It might be used for cross-wiki templates to reduce existing duplication and other auxiliary tasks, but Abstract Wikipedia is the reason it was proposed.

vasco3• 3 years ago

Abstract Wikipedia is in my opinion fully wasted work. Translation is free and instant for web pages. I've lived for 6 years in different countries where I don't speak the local language (and am also not native English speaking) and you can get all the information you need by translating. This works totally fine already today with Google translate on top of pages.

And the pages that are in fact missing from "the other language wikis" are local myths, local detailed history, things that wouldn't even be in the English Wikipedia or in the "abstract" version in the first place.

zelphirkalt2• 3 years ago

Not everyone wants to use Google services to be able to read information on Wikipedia.

nologic014• 3 years ago

This is wrong on two counts: 1) translation is not the same as abstraction and 2) having the world's encyclopedia translated by an advertising company is not exactly everybody's idea for how things should be organized

Of course wrong criticism doesnt mean the project is a success (i think its been going for a few years now). The documentation in particular does not highlight what this infrastructure is good for.

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

Not to mention that machine translation became dramatically better with LLMs like GPT 4 and will just get better over time... rapidly.

I fully expect by next year for AI translation of Wiki-like content to be essentially perfect.

reaperducer• 3 years ago

This works totally fine already today with Google translate on top of pages.

How would anyone even know? By definition, if someone is using Google Translate, he already doesn't know the language, so how can he judge the quality of the results?

My company spends millions on professional translators because products like Google Translate are so bad for anything beyond the most basic uses.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

Translation is free and instant for web pages.

And also very often quite incorrect, and you don't know where.

I think the general idea of a "universal language" Wikipedia, that gets flawlessly rendered into local languages, is laudable.

But I don't think anybody would ever edit in it directly -- what I want to see is that when somebody edits Wikipedia to add a new sentence, it attempts to translate into the "universal language" and prompt you to select from ambiguities.

E.g. if you wrote:

  I saw someone on the hill with a telescope.

It would ask you to confirm which of the following was intended:

  [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "I saw"
  [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "someone on the hill"

And it would also ask to clarify meanings, e.g.:

  [ ] "saw" - spotted visually
  [ ] "saw" - dated romantically

It would be a real dream to have translated outputs that were guaranteed to be correct, because the intermediate representation was correct, because the translation from someone's native language to that intermediate translation was verified in this way.

guy982387102• 3 years ago

You might well be right. Furthermore, English is on its way to become the universal language everyone speaks. You are however wrong about comparing AW to translators, which are probabilistic algorithms whereas AW is intended to be as exact as Wolfram Alpha. AW should be also able to use Wikidata to generate unique articles that do not exist even in English.

BTW, translation tech is not as good as you paint it here. I regularly translate my English blog posts to Slovak and every blog post requires 20-30 corrections. DeepL is marginally better than Google Translate. GPT-4 cannot even get word inflection right, an embarrassing fail for such a large model.

cypress66• 3 years ago

Talk about over engineering

bawolff6• 3 years ago

Yeah, you're not the only one to think that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

lifeisstillgood• 3 years ago

This is I suspect what a Domain Driven Design should be - every compmay should have something like this. Things like "how do we estimate the number of headlamps needed from supplier A, B and C in the next three months"

ngc6677• 3 years ago

Wondering, if a function execution will be able to (a) be called from a URL, with inputs `https://wikifunctions.org/to-base-64?input=my%20string` (b) retrieve the output from the URL `https://wikifunctions.org/tobase-64?output=bXkgc3RyaW5n`? It could be used directly from the Browser's Omnibox URL address bar, such as with https://searx.be/info/en/search-syntax, https://duckduckgo.com/bangs, https://github.com/internet4000/find

mormegil2• 3 years ago

Well, MediaWiki has a comprehensive API, so yeah, see e.g. https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action...

But I don't think Wikimedia Foundation wants to provide a free-to-all unlimited compute... No idea what the resource limit plans are, etc. But at least now in this early phase, the user rights are very limited, anyway.

yosito2• 3 years ago

I couldn't find a function for which the implementation is visible. Which leaves me quite confused about what exactly the nature of this wiki is.

brap• 3 years ago

The implementation is in the 'details' tab, but even still this project is very confusing.

yosito2• 3 years ago

All of the details tabs I checked had a message saying that the implementation was hidden.

vrandecic6• 3 years ago

Sine the wiki hasn't been opened for editing yet, there is indeed only one function that has visible implementations (which was added for testing purposed): https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10000 - all others are built-in and then invisible.

The two implementations are in Python and JavaScript (and rather trivial): https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10004 https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10005

firefoxd• 3 years ago

Well, that one hurts a bit. I think I got the domain name for close to 6 years now. Been paying ever since. Oh i got the hosting as well, been paying for that for 3 years at least.

If only I ever got to finishing it. Though my version looks more like stackoverflow where people can upvote edits of functions.

zarzavat• 3 years ago

Don’t sweat it. It appears this wikifunctions is not intended for “mortals” to use. It’s an implementation detail of an upcoming structured data project.

andersa• 3 years ago

This has to be one of the most confusing documentation sites I have ever seen. Maybe I just don't get it, since I never edited Wikipedia.

Opening some of the pages at random, like

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z828

https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z110

There's a "try this function" section, which I couldn't get to take any sort of input on a few tries. It always ended up with a field that said "no results found" on typing things in it.

There's a "current object" section, displaying some kind of alien script. Like, what is this? Is it supposed to tell me something?

    "Z1K1": "Z2",
    "Z2K1": {
        "Z1K1": "Z6",
        "Z6K1": "Z110"
    },
    "Z2K2": {
        "Z1K1": "Z8",
    this goes on for quite a while

Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?

_aaed• 3 years ago

I think the Current Object section is specifying the hierarchy for the current page and also the hierarchy compared to its relatives. All the Z something identifiers are objects/pages/concepts

bawolff6• 3 years ago

Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?

That would be my biggest criticism too. It seems like the target audience and use cases are ill defined, vauge and hand wavey.

I dont think it knows really what it wants to be, other than definitely some sort of function store for abstract wikipedia, which also seems unnessarily complex.

Quite frankly i get massive wikidata-second-system vibes from the whole thing.

capableweb• 3 years ago

Clearly I am not part of the target audience here. But who is?

Abstract Wikipedia authors/editors/developers is the target audience. As far as I can gather, this Wikifunctions is supposed to be a store for functions used to generate text based on data, so things can be written once and "automatically" translated to many languages, meaning you can cover more by stating "facts" and matching them to outputted language somehow.

moritzwarhier4• 3 years ago

https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:What_Wikifu...

We are not competing with sites such as gist, or sites such as [...] esolangs.org

pests2• 3 years ago

Somehow that still doesnt give enough counter examples to figure out what it is.

quiddity2• 3 years ago

We didn’t want to announce Wikifunctions before you can edit it (what’s a wiki if you can’t edit it?).

It is currently in locked-down testing. We have been slowly configuring and testing the wiki, the first new multilingual project in over 12 years! It is more complicated than a normal new wiki, in many ways.

We are expecting to open it to broader editing in the next few days - on or after August 1. We are planning an announcement at that time.

There are details of the deployment plan in our last newsletter: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_...

And a broad overview of the project at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Overview

(And many more examples of functions at our older Beta-deployment location (also currently locked down) at https://wikifunctions.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Ma... )

I hope that context helps! [Disclaimer: I'm not a developer, but work with the team]

djbusby• 3 years ago

Disclosure, not disclaimer.

Lockal• 3 years ago

Huh, it took me a while to find that there is a UI for exactly this object on "Details" tab.

I hope "Z1K1": "Z2" will be removed from UI soon. It is like "Q42 P31 Q5" for Wikidata - everyone understands it, but it is not the main interface.

Basically, at this point of development, consider this as a storage of Python (https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10004) or Javascript code (https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z10005).

But instead of writing

  def format_person_info(name, surname, birth_date, death_date):
     return "{} {} ({}-{})".format(name, surname, birth_date, death_date)

you need to

1) create a page that declares a public interface for your function: and there is no "camel case vs snake case": function name will be "Format person info" (and フォーマット担当者情報 in Japanese, and so on), with arguments: name, surname, birth date, death date (again, people can add translations)

2) create a set of tests

3) create an implementation using Zvalues (see links above for example) in public interface. If this is not the first version, implementation can be reviewed and approved by some reviewer.

Eduard• 3 years ago

It is like "Q42 P31 Q5" for Wikidata - everyone understands it, ...

I don't.

starkparker8• 3 years ago

Kind of surprised nobody's posted this in reply yet (or that these aren't linked to from anywhere I can find in the UI), but:

on ZObjects: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/ZObject

on human-readable equivalents to the above: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Canonical...

It's all so very utopian.

8bitsrule• 3 years ago

I spent a few minutes scanning the 'intro' pages. If there were any function examples there, I missed it/them.

A simple example or five of what in the hell a function can do might motivate some readers to want to dig deeper. I don't want to today.

vrandecic6• 3 years ago

Thanks, that's really helpful to read! The page is still in a very early stage. You are right, the current object section is just confusing, we will remove it.

Maybe a better start to understand what Wikifunctions does - but it is a very simple example too - is this function: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z10000

The other functions that you found randomly are currently not well supported.

We are working on it, to make it less confusing. Such feedback is very helpful.

vrandecic6• 3 years ago

As planned, with our first scheduled weekly deployment, the JSON object is not being displayed anymore.

low_tech_punk• 3 years ago

Like https://val.town but written in a wiki specific python or javascript? I wish there is an easy way to see the code for each function instead of the "low code" UI.

Ref: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:How_to_crea...

fegu• 3 years ago

Most interesting functions use other functions. I did not find how they solve using existing functions, avoiding duplication of basic functionality, but also handling how things might break if an underlying function is independently updated. Does anyone know how they solve this, it is an interesting problem?

ulrischa• 3 years ago

Who should use this? When I search for a function I need it in a programming language I use.

bawolff6• 3 years ago

In theory they want to have functions in all programming languages

layer8• 3 years ago

This gives some background:

https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:FAQ

https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Introductio...

zelphirkalt2• 3 years ago

Has anyone figured out how to input lists? It shows inputs for selecting the type of each element of a list, but when I select a type like "String" the type input field is empty again. When I do not enter anything, but click the "dropdown arrow" right of the field, the field becomes grayed out and empty again. Not sure how to use this.

trashburger2• 3 years ago

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates...

Initially, we will support two pre-defined Types for the inputs and outputs of Functions: Strings and Booleans. The creation of new Types will at first be restricted to staff members.

Seems like no list support yet.

chrisjj• 3 years ago

I was about to say I stopped reading at:

the creation of new development environments or programming languages or paradigms will become easier, as they could simply refer to Wikilambda for a vast library of functions.

... except morbid curiosity compelled me to the end.

olsonjeffery2• 3 years ago

https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/05876...

lanstin5• 3 years ago

I remember being intrigued by this idea. I doubt it would work but it’s interesting to understand why. Seems the main hold up is that each function might have to point to other function as dependencies, so it’s not going to be linear but really a graph. And then you are immediately in the position of I like this code but I am user Log package N, but they use Log package M so I have to copy and edit. . Vs _ and how things are published and versioned is just implementation details.

sriku• 3 years ago

I keep the cynicism inside me in check usually, but these days finding it harder to do. So people contribute to this and then what? Google/MS/OpenAI etc train models on the data and try to sell it back to us?

chris_wot2• 3 years ago

These look like they are all builtins. I’m really not sure what is meant by “decolonising functions”, it seems to take inspiration from a professor who allowed his class to speak and discuss mathematics in Spanish (admirable!)… but this is a website!

I can’t even tell if there is a documentation area.

Perhaps this may get better over time?

Havoc• 3 years ago

Also quite confused as to what this? Like a central directory of common programmatic tasks/algos?

osigurdson• 3 years ago

Perhaps if this would have been introduced 20 years ago it may have gotten some traction. ChatGPT / AI seems like the ideal spot to request functions as it can also tweak - though honestly it isn't as good as I'd like it to be (yet).

moritzwarhier4• 3 years ago

So I spent what amounts to almost an hour today being amazed and entertained by the perceiced absurdity of this.

Now, after a good dinner, reading the FAQ again, I'm starting to roughly feel like this might actually make sense, in another world, or maybe it might even make sense in reality when better fleshed-out?

And also I start to remember what this reminds me of (plenty of other entertaining references already here in the comments):

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect

  Two days later he started poking around. He started with a seemingly-innocuous file called “customers.json” and stared in confusion at its contents:

      {
        "File" : "Customers.json",
        "Class" : "Customers",
        "Author" : "redacted@redacted.com",
        "Purpose" : "",
        "Functions" : [
            568,
            899,
            900,
            901,
            902,
            1877,
            2880
        ]
    }

pests2• 3 years ago

Wow I haven't seen thedailywtf in a long time. I used to read it daily back when Google Reader was still around.

starkparker8• 3 years ago

Previously: "Wikipedia Is Trying to Transcend the Limits of Human Language" (2021) on the announcement of Wikifunctions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28389516

mikewarot• 3 years ago

It really doesn't explain what it's for.. so I'm left to guess that it's a RosettaCode clone.[1]

I can't figure out how you're going to see implementations of a function in the language of your choice.

Will there be C/C++/D/Go/Rust/Python/Java sections?

[1] https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

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