Wikifunctions is a Wikimedia project for everyone to collaboratively create and maintain a library of code functions to support the Wikimedia projects and beyond, in the world’s natural and programming languages.
Wikifunctions consists of functions. A function has a description, a list of parameters, test cases, a list of implementations in different programming languages, and further metadata. The implementations can be reused in other software projects (private apps or scripts), be called and executed online (either just in the browser or in a cloud environment or Jupyter[1] or PAWS[2] notebooks), composed to achieve more complex functionality, signed, analyzed or validated, and much more.
For example the ROT13 function: Function: ROT13 Z10627 Function (Z8) - Wikifunctions
By clicking on the “Details” tab, we can see it is available in Python and Javascript.
I have read somewhere that all the functions are pure. And it seems other languages will be possible in the future (why not Fortran? I read something about webassembly on one page => LFortran).
It is related to the project:
At the moment, I have not a clear understanding of those surprising projects I had never heard of. Please share your understanding here…
Not entirely new because of an error report to GitHub here about the availability of openbabel outside the project’s page. The listing in question was provided by repology.org where wikifunctions are included:
Compared to a «normal» sources repology queries once an hour, the number of packages by wikidata is lower (about 5k packages (reference), vs e.g. approximately 36k of Debian 13/trixie (reference), both at a similar rate of about 2/3 of the packages matching the most recent version of their corresponding sources). Likely reasons include: wikidata isn’t an operating system, as project considerably younger of age .and. still less known.
On the other hand, let’s query repology again for applications packaged by wikidata : does the favourable colour of the badge about gcc (reference)
imply an additional avenue to attract the potentially interested to Fortran? Maybe. The green badges – at time of writing – equally assigned to wikidata’s packages of applications like geany, code::blocks, neovim (but not vim), GNU Emacs might help here.
I am lost… Can you explain why wikidata is packaging applications? On their webpage they say:
Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.
Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and others.
And is Wikifunctions objective to work on data provided by Wikidata?
@vmagnin Here it becomes speculation: the coverage of topics is incoherent, and provision of tools and applications might help to close the gaps.
Even if the edition in English has the largest number of lemmata (about 6M), this covers only about 1/3 of all entries. There are 11 languages considered as popular (i.e. with a number of contributors .ge. 1k / language), but half of the languages covered (146) have .lt. 10 contributors each (numbers cf. vide infra). By provision of tools and applications, translation/inspire a collaboration/augment data/content/pages become easier, than ever. Else why would wikidata provide e.g. abiword?
I found Denny Vrandečić From knowledge graphs to abstract Wikipedia at the Graph Technologies in the Humanities 2021 Virtual Symposium pdf slides, with a corresponding youtube recording (about an hour long). Apparently in the frame of Semantic MediaWiki operating in lines of «Turn your MediaWiki into a powerful and flexible knowledge management system». My early interpretation: the aim is a Luhmann Zettelkasten (including personal information management, PIM, as sub set of PKM) boosted by techniques of machine learning & trained language models and hence maybe counterweight to ChatGPT & Cie (WIKIDATA Knowledge Graph Makes ChatGPT TRUTHFUL…, or Wikibase as an infrastructure for Knowledge Graphs: The EU Knowledge Graph).
There are already some dedicated tools in this field (an example, no affiliation), and (electronic metaphors of) card indexes of, too (vimwiki, markdown/obsidian, orgmode, etc. – all in plain text of only light markup only).
