• "...would creating a system that aligns the contents more closely with each other sacrifice that [knowledge] diversity..."
• Differences between Wikipedia languages editions i.e. problems
  • "...there is nothing that ensures that articles in different language editions are aligned or kept consistent with each other."
  • "The knowledge in Wikipedia is unevenly distributed."
    • "...local Wikipedias may frequently have more content on topics of local interest..." —> benefits are two-sided/the knowledge flows both ways
    • "In total, the different language Wikipedias cover 18 million different topics in over 50 million articles — and English only covers 31% of the topics."
    • "English Wikipedia has 5.8 million articles, German has 2.2 million articles — but only 1.1 million topics are covered by both Wikipedias." —> opportunity for visual
    • "...how up to date the different language editions are..."
  • "To assume that fewer than ten active contributors can write and maintain a comprehensive encyclopedia in their spare time is optimistic at best.....these numbers basically doom the mission of the Wikimedia movement to realize a world where everyone can contribute to the sum of all knowledge."
  • We should consider a framing of "the first twenty years of Wikipedia have been about X" and "the next twenty years will be about Y" — "The first twenty years of Wikipedia have been about documenting knowledge in dominant (high prestige? colonial? Western?) languages. The next twenty years will be about building power for underrepresented communities."
• Enter Wikidata
  • "Over the years, the structured features became increasingly intricate: info boxes moved to templates, templates started using more sophisticated MediaWiki functions, and then later demanded the development of even more powerful MediaWiki features. In order to maintain the structured data, bots were created, software agents that could read content from Wikipedia or other sources and then perform automatic updates to other parts of Wikipedia. Before the introduction of Wikidata, bots keeping the language links between the different Wikipedias in sync, easily contributed 50% and more of all edits in many language edition. Wikidata allowed for an outlet to many of these activities, and relieved the Wikipedias of having to run bots to keep language links in sync or of massive infobox maintenance tasks."
  • Denny's context "...one lesson I learned from these activities is that I can trust the communities with mastering complex workflows spread out between community members with different capabilities: in fact, a small number of contributors working on intricate template code and developing bots can provide invaluable support to contributors who focus more on maintaining articles and contributors who write the majority of the prose. The community is very heterogeneous, and the different capabilities and backgrounds complement each other in order to create Wikipedia."
  • Carolyn's experience with Wikidata having become its own geeky community
• An Abstract Wikipedia
  • The first half of the post lists all the inequities that exist between the different language Wikipedias... and it's not clearly stated how AW will solve these inequities...
  • So we built Wikidata with the intention of providing more data for all language Wikipedias but it wasn't enough... "limited expressivity"
  • "An Abstract Wikipedia must allow for:
    • relations that connect more than just two participants with heterogeneous roles.
    • composition of items on the fly from values and other items.
    • expressing knowledge about arbitrary subjects, not just the topic of the page.
    • ordering content, to be able to represent a narrative structure.
    • expressing redundant information."
  • It's unclear to me how AW will solve the problems listed above
  • Will the AW aspect of the AW project require participation from small Wikis? Will we need them to populate AW with data that's relevant to the topics they cover?
• A plea for knowledge diversity
  • Valuable goals
    • To not force a single point of view on all languages
    • Give minority language speakers the ability to maintain their own encyclopedias, to have space where, indigenous speakers can foster and grow their own point of view, without being forced to unify under the western US-dominated perspective.
    • Retain rich diversity in knowledge
• Language does not align with culture
  • ...
• South Slavic Wikipedias
  • ...
• AW and knowledge diversity
  • AW is optional and using it is flexible
    • Can you name a use case?
  • Denny's personal example of how he could have used something like AW when he started Croatian Wikipedia is powerful and a human-sized need.
  • "The Abstract Wikipedia frees a language edition from this burden, and allows each community to entirely focus on the parts they care about most.." —> how???
  • "it becomes possible to imagine an effective workflow that observes these intentional differences, and sets up a path to integrate them into the common article in the Abstract Wikipedia." —> there is already a possible workflow in mind?
• A new incentive infrastructure
  • "With the Abstract Wikipedia though, the goal of providing a comprehensive and current encyclopedia in almost any language becomes much more tangible: instead of taking on the task of creating and maintaining the entire content, only the grammatical and lexical knowledge of a given language needs to be created. This is a far smaller task."

Assumptions

• "....can [the communities] meet the challenges of this project?" —> Assumption is that this project can meet the needs of the communities
• "Wikipedia and Wikidata have shown that the communities are capable to meet difficult challenges" —> Assumption is we will be working with these same communities? that the new communities will do the same?