Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-05-22/Recent research - Wikipedia
Jump to content
Search
Search
Donate
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Donate
Create account
Log in
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost | 2026-05-22
WikiLambda the Ultimate: Does Abstract Wikipedia help fight "One ring to rule them all" solutions for knowledge access – or does it implement one itself?
← Back to Contents<br>View Latest Issue<br>22 May 2026
File:Wikifunctions-favicon.svg<br>NGC 54, Jon Harald Søby, Stevenliuyi<br>cc-by-sa-4.0
300
Recent research<br>WikiLambda the Ultimate<br>Contribute —<br>Share this
PDF download
Mastodon
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
By e mln e and Tilman Bayer
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"Wikilambda the ultimate: the Wikimedia foundation’s search for the perfect language"
Reviewed by User:e_mln_e<br>This paper[1] by Michael Falk (of the WikiHistories project) uses Critical Code Studies methods to examine Wikilambda, the extension of the MediaWiki software that underlies Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia.
"Wikifunctions – Top-level architectural model" (from 2021, by the Wikimedia Foundation, reproduced as figure 1 in the paper)<br>Wikifunctions, a collaboratively edited library of computer functions, is the newest Wikimedia project, launched in 2023. Abstract Wikipedia, a language-independent version of Wikipedia that the Wikimedia Foundation has been developing since 2020, relies on Wikifunctions and thereby Wikilambda to convert structured data from Wikidata into natural language. In other words, Wikilambda is the programming language using Wikifunctions to fetch structured data and facts from Abstract Wikipedia, to translate it into other written language.
Published in the journal AI & Society, the paper argues that Wikilambda is an attempt to create a 'perfect language'. Comparing it to previous attempts to create perfect languages, the paper suggests Wikilambda cannot meet its stated goals, and points to assumptions about its potential users that likely aren't correct.
Definitions
What does the author mean by a perfect language? The article refers to Umberto Eco's 1995 book The Search for the Perfect Language, which looks at various attempts in history to create ideal languages.<br>Umberto Eco (1995, 73) distinguishes two kinds of ideal language: the "perfect" and the "universal". As described in the article:
A perfect language is one that is “capable of mirroring the true nature of objects. Such a language must analyse the world into its constituent parts, and provide means to build it back up again. Each word must correspond to a real component of nature, and each syntactic rule must correspond to a way that nature combines primitive elements into complex entities.
A universal language is ideal in a different way: it is a language which everyone might, or ought to, speak. Esperanto is an example among the spoken languages. Among programming languages, BASIC, Logo, Python and Scratch are examples of languages that are intended to be universally accessible.
Umberto Eco's book describes many such projects that have failed in the past, because language is not easily severed from symbolism or necessitate a significant learning effort, while not offering the advantages of connection it promised. For instance, Esperanto didn't grow to become a lingua franca. Researchers[supp 1] note that:
Despite the logical concept and intellectual appeal of a standard language, Esperanto has not evolved into a dominant worldwide language. Instead, English, with all its idiosyncrasies, is closest to an international lingua franca. Like Zamenhof, standards committees in medical informatics have recognized communication chaos and have tried to establish working models, with mixed results. In some cases, previously shunned proprietary systems have become the standard. A proposed standard, no matter how simple, logical, and well designed, may have difficulty displacing an imperfect but functional "real life" system.
Overall argument
Falk argues Wikilambda is an attempt to create two ideal languages :
The proposed "template language" for Abstract Wikipedia is intended to be both perfect and universal: it will be perfectly able to express any fact, and universally accessible by writers all over the world. To implement this "template language", the Abstract Wikipedia team has gone about developing another perfect and universal language: Wikilambda. This programming language will enable the people of the world to collaborate to build the constructors and renderers that will define and express the sum of human knowledge. According to the Wikilambda developers, Wikilambda is universal because it breaks the hegemony of English; it is perfect because it is not actually a language.
If WikiLambda indeed is an attempt to create ideal languages, it...