Wikifunctions:Status updates/2026-05-23

Wikifunctions Status updates

Annual plan 2026-2027

The draft of the Wikimedia Foundation 2026-2027 annual plan has been published for discussion. This includes an objective for Abstract Wikipedia:

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

Context: The Internet is increasingly shaped by automatically produced text that is often opaque and unverifiable. At the same time, manually created knowledge alone cannot adequately fill multilingual content gaps. Can Wikipedia’s human-led model of knowledge creation scale across languages without sacrificing trust, transparency, or community control? By making one contribution reusable across many languages, Abstract Wikipedia seeks to answer that question.

This objective is initially broken down into four key results:

Key Result: By the end of Q1, ensure that fragment rendering performance of the integration into Wikipedias is maintained without regression as deployment expands from the first demonstration into the initial target language Wikipedias, so that the system remains responsive and welcoming to editors as they draft changes.

Context: Deepen multilingual viability for Abstract Wikipedia by ensuring that expansion of availability and usage does not impair performance. To make sure that Abstract Wikipedia is viable as a platform for users and sustainable for the Foundation, we will rebuild our prototype integration into Wikipedias, expanding from the work done in FY26Q4 into one that supports and scales successfully to our envisioned 5–10 additional early adopter Wikipedias, in a way that keeps down the operational cost for Wikimedia in terms of server time and so production load/scale.

Key Result: By the end of Q1, increase the number of sentences and core elements in Abstract Wikipedia articles, with more articles receiving follow-up edits.

Context: This KR builds on our current focus on supporting the core community by strengthening the building blocks that enable richer, longer articles. It shifts the emphasis from simply increasing article volume to fostering meaningful article development that aligns with community expectations around quality. At the same time, it deepens editor engagement while keeping flexibility to adapt based on evolving community needs.

Key Result: By the end of Q2, one proof of concept article is created on Abstract Wikipedia and integrated in three Wikipedias.

Context: This KR area defines measures for content growth and maintenance rates for the different relevant contents of Abstract Wikipedia, and based on these, measures that indicate that contributor communities will be able to to create and maintain Abstract Wikipedia articles, Wikifunctions language functions, relevant Wikidata Lexemes, and/or integration into Wikipedia at a rate that can meet the threshold for scalable content viability. We also develop an understanding of second-order effects on the development of existing Wikipedia language communities.

Key Result: By the end of Q1, 100% of pilot cohort users have migrated away from Blazegraph endpoints.

Context: The Wikidata Platform backend replacement will be ready to serve production traffic by end of FY25/26. The new system will offer capacity improvements for Wikidata, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), and all systems integrated with either tool. We are beginning our migration with a small group of pilot users to baseline migration efforts and user impact of the new backend. The learnings we collect during Q1 will be used to support the Abstract Wikipedia use case in Q2.

Note that the language isn’t final, especially because we are asking for feedback and discussion to amend the language based on the community's input.

Wikipediapodden Episode #368 with James Forrester

In the latest episode of the Podcast about Wikipedia, Wikipediapodden, Jan Ainali is interviewing James Forrester. They are discussing the progress of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions since the last episode that was centered around Abstract Wikipedia four years ago, #154.

Recent Changes in the software

This week, we made improvements across Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. On Abstract Wikipedia, edit and history pages now show the article title as well as the QID, which should make it easier to understand which article you are looking at (T424265 & T424095). In addition, references created by functions can now also include working links to non-Wikimedia websites, so external citations work as expected (T423180).

On Wikifunctions, we also added a new filter to Special:ListObjectsByType, so you can now filter functions based on what kind of result they return (T301712). Finally, we ran a script to try to clean up out-of-date Test case results, though it doesn't seem to have fully fixed things (T422300).

Two notes about forthcoming changes: we are planning to raise the version of the Python codebase we're using on the evaluator service, moving to approximately Python 3.14 equivalence, up from 3.13 (T426353). We're saying "approximately" as technically this is RustPython, for performance and security reasons. We don't think this change will break anything, but we wanted to alert you ahead of the changes in the next week or two. Secondly, we are going to drop the pre-defined Function Z831/Validate against schema, which has not been available since the re-write of the orchestrator service, and we believe is unused (T418886).

Fresh Functions weekly: 65 new Functions

This week we had 65 new functions! Here is an incomplete list of functions with implementations and passing 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.