Wikilambda the Ultimate

Wikipedia’s Utopian Platform for Open Collaboration

Michael Falk

The University of Melbourne

The story of the search for the perfect language is the story of a dream and of a series of failures. (Eco 1995, 19)

An Alarming Headline

The front page of The Signpost on 1 January 2023. (Bayer 2023)

Wikilambdafunctions

The Wikifunctions logo, incorporating lambda (\(\lambda\)). wikifunctions.org

How it Will Work

The Architecture of the Abstract Wikipedia project (“Extension:WikiLambda” 2024). by jdforrester CC BY-SA 4.0

The Escape from Language

Beyond natural language:

The conclusion is that the Wikimedia movement does not believe that language is the right dimension to split knowledge—it is a historical decision, driven by convenience. (Vrandečić 2020, 182)

Beyond programming languages:

Wikifunctions is not a programming language, nor is trying to evangelise a particular language
Wikifunctions will allow for functions to be implemented in a multitude of programming languages. The possibility to compose functions together to create higher level functions may look a little bit like a new programming language, but it will be extremely limited compared to most other programming languages, since we only allow for nested function calls and that’s it. (“Wikifunctions:What Wikifunctions Is Not” 2024)

The Two Perfections of Umberto Eco

Universality (a là Esperanto):

Imagine a programming system that truly is accessible, one that is open not only to speakers of English but to billions of people more who will not have to learn English first in order to learn how to program. (“Wikifunctions:Vision” 2023)

Perfection (a là Earthsea Old Speech):

… we do not really think of function composition as a new programming language, but rather as an abstract syntax tree to compose function calls together, but this difference may be purely terminological. (Blanton et al. 2022)

Universality / সর্বজনীনতা

Function Z802 in Bangla

The \(\lambda\)-Calculus

\[ Y = \lambda f. \ (\lambda x.f\ (x\ x))\ (\lambda x.f\ (x\ x)) \]

Alonzo Church, inventor of the \(\lambda\)-calculus. Source: Wikipedia

the program is a textsymphony

static createInternal_( zobjectJSON, scope, parentPointer ) {
        if ( isString( zobjectJSON ) || zobjectJSON instanceof ZWrapper ) {
            return zobjectJSON;
        }
        let result;
        if ( isZEnvelope( zobjectJSON ) ) {
            result = new ZEnvelopeWrapper(); // eslint-disable-line no-use-before-define
        } else {
            result = new ZWrapper();
        }
        result.setScope( scope );
        result.parent_ = parentPointer; // will use parent in case scope does not exist
        result.populateKeys_( zobjectJSON );
        return result;
    }

The equivalent of the eval or eval-dispatch function in the function orchestrator. Source: src/ZWrapper.js in Massaro et al. (2024).

Through the production of new forms of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of the future. (Wark 2004, sec. 077)

References

Bayer, Tilman. 2023. “Wikimedia Foundation’s Abstract Wikipedia Project ’at Substantial Risk of Failure’.” The Signpost, January. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-01-01/Technology_report.
Blanton, Cai, Cory Massaro, David Martin, Denny Vrandečić, Genoveva Galarza Heredero, James Forrester, Julia Kieserman, and Stef Dunlap. 2022. “Abstract Wikipedia/Google.org Fellows Evaluation - Answer.” Wikimedia Meta-Wiki. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abstract_Wikipedia/Google.org_Fellows_evaluation_-_Answer&oldid=24262326.
Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language. Making of Europe. Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
“Extension:WikiLambda.” 2024. MediaWiki. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Extension:WikiLambda&oldid=6467929.
Massaro, Cory, Denny Vrandečić, Daphne Smit, David Martin, Ecarg, Genoveva Galarza, Jeena Huneidi, James Forrester, Stef Dunlap, and Vaughn Walters. 2024. “Function-Orchestrator.” https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/abstract-wiki/wikifunctions/function-orchestrator/-/tree/86514fdaa663a75c9ebbda232c35e3248adbec5d.
Vrandečić, Denny. 2020. “Collaborating on the Sum of All Knowledge Across Languages,” October. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12366.003.0016.
Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674044845.
“Wikifunctions:Vision.” 2023. Wikifunctions. https://www.wikifunctions.org/w/index.php?title=Wikifunctions:Vision&oldid=50281.
“Wikifunctions:What Wikifunctions Is Not.” 2024. Wikifunctions. https://www.wikifunctions.org/w/index.php?title=Wikifunctions:What_Wikifunctions_is_not&oldid=71136.