Wikifunctions is starting up

After three years of development, we are excited to share that Wikifunctions is slowly beginning to roll out. 

Wikifunctions, the newest Wikimedia project, is a new space to collaboratively create and maintain a library of functions. You can think of these functions like recipes for a meal—they take inputs and produce an output (a reliable answer). You might have experienced something similar when using a search engine to find the distance between two locations, the volume of an object, converting two units, and more. 

You can learn more about how Wikifunctions works in this short video on Commons and YouTube.

Wikifunctions is a project that allows you to create new functions, run existing functions, and understand how they work. We anticipate that the system will eventually be able to generate sentences, texts, and full articles. Using the simple facts housed in Wikidata, you will be able to write functions that make calculations, provide a person’s age, estimate population densities, and more, and integrate the results into Wikipedia.

Additionally, Wikifunctions allows you to read and implement functions in your native language, be that English, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, or one of the hundreds of other supported languages. 

At the moment, just like any other new Wikimedia initiative, we are rolling out Wikifunctions with minimal content and features to start. Logged-in contributors can run a few early functions, and editing will be limited as we test the project’s stability. You can request edit access on Wikifunctions, and we will give out the rights to more people as we test and learn. Things will bend, break, get fixed, and break again as we build up the project’s capabilities. For now, we are excited to announce that the Wikimedia communities have decided on the very first function: join together. The function takes two strings and returns them combined. If you are logged-in, you can try it out now on Wikifunctions.

We are looking forward to a thriving community to grow and maintain a library of many useful and interesting functions in the future.

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Wikifunctions is a core component of the larger Abstract Wikipedia initiative, which will enable Wikimedia volunteer editors to create and maintain content in a single place that can be shared across languages. In short: Abstract Wikipedia will build a system where an editor can contribute knowledge using their native Swahili, and a reader will be able to benefit from that knowledge by reading it in their native Japanese.

Thank you

On behalf of the Abstract Wikipedia team and the whole Wikimedia movement, please join me in welcoming Wikifunctions as a new project. We can’t be more excited to invite you to experience it. 

We plan to continue developing Wikifunctions to add new features: we will build in better support for programming languages, access to Wikidata, integration with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, the ability to deal with binary data files, and much more. You can keep up with our plans and work by following these periodic updates.

If you are interested in working with us to build a catalog of functions (and have some patience to deal with the hiccups of an early new project), please join us as a contributor on Wikifunctions! We are looking forward to becoming a new community.

We thank Google.org, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wikimedia Endowment for their support.

Denny Vrandečić is Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation