Convergence Accelerator: Denny Vrandečić

Denny Vrandečić

Wikimedia Foundation

Knowledge beyond the Graph: Toward a Multilingual Wikipedia

Recording of the talk

Abstract

Wikipedia’s vision is a world in which everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge. In its first two decades, this vision has been very unevenly achieved. One of the largest hindrances is the sheer number of languages Wikipedia needs to cover in order to achieve that goal. We argue that we need a new approach to tackle this problem more effectively, a multilingual Wikipedia where content can be shared between language editions.

We have started a new project where we separate this goal into two parts: creating and maintaining content in an abstract notation within a project called Abstract Wikipedia, and creating a new project called Wikifunctions that can translate this notation to natural language. Both parts are fully owned and maintained by the community. This architecture will make more encyclopedic content available to more people in their own language, and at the same time allow more people to contribute knowledge and reach more people with their contributions, no matter what their respective language backgrounds.

Bio

Denny Vrandečić has joined Wikimedia Foundation as Head of Special Projects in order to lead the Abstract Wikipedia project. He obtained his Ph.D. from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2012 where he co-founded Semantic MediaWiki, and thereafter launched Wikidata at Wikimedia Deutschland. He then joined Google as an ontologist on the Google Knowledge Graph and later worked as a researcher on the topic of knowledge representation.