Wikifunctions:Status updates/2026-07-01

Wikifunctions Status updates

Integration on test wiki

The "big thing" we've been working on in the team since Abstract Wikipedia was launched back in March was providing the system to integrate articles onto Wikipedias. I'm delighted to now demonstrate that the very first version of this is live on the Test Wikipedia (with some caveats).

I'll give examples here based on Q90, the abstract article for Paris, because it's very short and simple, and we're planning to use it as a demonstration during the Wikimania workshop in Paris in three weeks' time:

For pilot wikis (currently just Test Wikipedia), you can go to the new special page Special:PreviewAbstract for an approved abstract article to see what it looks like (e.g., do all the fragments come through in your language, are there any missing Functions or lexemes, is the writing idiomatic, etc.):

Special:PreviewAbstract/Q90

Note: Test Wikipedia is showing the correct content, but the "wrong" label at the top, because for other teams' work it talks to the Test Wikidata, not the real Wikidata, and so "Q90" is a different concept; this won't affect real community wikis.

As a sysop, you can choose to opt that article in to your wiki:

Special:CommunityConfiguration/AbstractWikiOptedInArticles

Note: Test Wikipedia already has an article about Paris, Paris, so for this demonstration I pointed the title "Paris, France" at the test content. As a sysop, you can of course remove the article (or add or remove any of its redirects) at any time, through the special page.

Now visit "Paris, France", and see the abstract article, rather than just a prompt to create a new article:

Paris,_France

This also works for the configured "secondary" title, as a redirect first to "Paris, France":

Paris_is_a_city

The existing "Paris" article is entirely unaffected:

Paris

This is our initial design, and we're sure that there are things you might spot that we could do better, or things which we haven't yet thought through sufficiently. Please tell us, so we can improve it.

Some quick things to note:

The "create local" tab allows you to create a local wikitext article, which will always "win" and replace the abstract article — it's a key part of the design, that local communities can always replace content easily.
The "edit abstract" and "abstract history" tabs take you to Abstract Wikipedia, the location of the editing and history pages. This is similar to how File pages for media files loaded from Commons show up. The two tabs are a very different experience to the "edit" and "history" tabs on wikitext pages, and we're thinking about ways to avoid confusing people.
There is a banner at the bottom of the content explaining that the article is from Abstract Wikipedia and when it was last updated, which we expect might not be needed forever. There is also an extra line in the footer with similar information, which we expect to retain for good.
There is currently a very small number of articles for which this is unlocked, just for test/demonstration purposes (Q319, Q42, Q84, Q52, and Q90, in English, French, German, and Spanish). This powers the script that refreshes each allowed article in each language every Monday, to keep articles up-to-date. We plan to make it possible for the Abstract Wikipedia community to control this list very soon, subject to some engineering performance concerns.
To maintain the demonstration and encourage people to write better articles about their own cities, it might be helpful to keep the Paris abstract article very short and simple for now.

The year ahead of us

The Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan for 1 July 2026–30 June 2027 has gone into effect today. Our work supporting Abstract Wikipedia is part of the "Deepen Engagement" theme, specifically to:

Demonstrate Abstract Wikipedia's viability as a scalable, human-centered way to create multi-lingual encyclopedic content

As we've discussed before, the idea of Abstract Wikipedia is to provide good, multi-lingual articles in many languages that individual Wikipedias can opt into providing to their readers if they don't yet have any article about that subject. Our current plan is that, first, pilot Wikipedias will opt in on a per-article basis if they're happy with it; later, we'll expand this to more Wikipedias, and allow Wikipedias to choose to opt-in by default for their missing article; you can read more of our thinking from when we discussed this back in January.

We plan to work with pilot Wikipedia communities over the next few months to make early explorations of whether they can use Abstract Wikipedia to meaningfully extend the articles they make available to their readers in a way that satisfies their quality concerns. As a starting point, we're planning to encourage them to write about and use abstract articles about cities. This is because they are common areas of interest that often have consistent themes in how they need to be described, they're generally not the scope of significant edit warring, and there are very many of them to document, so Abstract Wikipedia might well be able to support many Wikipedia's needs. If we're successful, multiple Wikipedias will see Abstract Wikipedia as a good support for their work in creating and maintaining articles for their readers on topics, and we can expand the pilot languages and encourage use in other areas. If we're not, we'll re-assess and see what we should do differently.

In parallel to this, we'll be working on improving the user experience, the performance and reliability of the system, and adding new features as their need increases, and our colleagues in our sibling team, the Wikidata Platform team, will be working on migrating and improving the Wikidata Query Service. It looks to be an exciting year!

Recent Changes in the software

This week, we changed how Abstract Wikipedia loads the article preview: instead of requesting fragment by fragment, it loads whole sections at once. All available fragments are shown immediately, while unavailable ones show a "Pending" block with a retry button (T425416).

We also fixed a logic error in our test runner code that meant broken user-created comparison objects in Tests would give a confusing error (T430082). And we released a correction to last week's red links feature, so that they also work in production the same as on developer machines (T424310).

Volunteers’ Corner on July 6

The next Volunteers’ Corner will be next Monday, 6 July 2026 at 17:30 UTC. We plan to have the following agenda: there will be time to ask questions and discuss all matters arising. If we have time, we will write a function together. Everyone is welcome to join us on Google Meet.

Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia at Wikimania 2026

Wikimania 2026, the annual main conference for all things Wikimedia, will be in Paris, France from 21–25 July this year. There will be a number of events about Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions (all times local):

Dnshitobu has session “Making indigenous languages ready for Wikifunctions” on Friday at 14:30
Mahir256 will organize a workshop “From Abstract Content to Concrete Text with Wikidata Lexemes” on Friday at 16:00
James, Luca, and Denny will be running “Abstract Wikipedia workshop: Let's create a multi-lingual article!” on Saturday at 11:00

If there are any further related events, let us know, and we are happy to add them!

Fresh Functions weekly: 76 new Functions

This week we had 76 new functions. We have crossed 4,600 Functions, just a few weeks before Wikimania. Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and tests to get a taste of what functions have been created. Thanks everybody for contributing!

A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created is available.