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.
That’ll get unruly really fast.
Languages simply don’t agree on how to split the usage of words. Or grammatical case. Or if, when and how to do agreement.
Just for the sake of example: how are they going to keep track of case in a way that doesn’t break Hindi, or Basque, or English, or Guarani? Or grammatical gender for a word like “milk”? (not even the Romance languages agree in it.) At a certain point, it gets simply easier to write the article in all those languages than to code something to make it for you.
I think that the best use scenario is to automate tidbits of highly changing data. It’s fairly limited but it could be useful.
They’re just going to write all the articles in lojban.
Not even that would do the trick - practical usage of Lojban heavily relies on fu’ivla, that carry with themselves the semantic scope assigned to the original words. .u’i I want to see them trying though.
I’ll reply to myself to highlight a point, and issue a challenge for those who assume that WMF’s apparent goal - to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic information - is actually viable:
Here’s an excerpt from an actual Wikipedia article: “the solubility of these gases depending on the temperature and salinity of the water.” Show me all the linguistic information that a writer would need to input, to convey the same information, in that system idealised by the goal, in a way that would not output “then who was phone?” tier nonsense for some languages. Then I’ll show you why it would still output nonsense for some languages.
Too much work? Then feel free to do it just for “of the water”. It’s a single PP, how hard would it be? /s
Hic Rhodes, hic salta.
[Edit reason: clarity.]