Quarterly plan for January–March 2026
As we move into this quarter (January–March), we'd like to share an overview of what we're planning next and how it connects to our broader goals for Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions.
In this quarter, we continue to support our central objective for the year: making more vital knowledge available across languages and topics. As we move into the second half of the fiscal year (note that the Foundation's financial year runs from July to June), we continue working toward two key results that guide our annual plan.
First, we are focused on building the platform capabilities needed to validate that we can support the Abstract Wikipedia vision at scale. This includes ensuring the platform can produce rich, multilingual encyclopedic content using Wikidata and natural language generation, remains performant as usage grows, and can be meaningfully extended by the community.
Second, we are working toward deploying a first version of Abstract Wikipedia, a new wiki for creating, editing, and storing Abstract articles. This involves building a minimal but usable Abstract Wikipedia experience, validating community expectations, and exploring how Abstract articles could be integrated into existing Wikipedias.
Much of our work in this quarter focuses on the foundational pieces these two outcomes depend on.
On the Wikifunctions platform, our work in this quarter concentrates primarily on performance, alongside smaller yet powerful improvements to Wikifunctions capabilities and the function creation experience needed to support Abstract Wikipedia.
Performance is an important focus for us in this quarter. As Wikifunctions begins to be used in more contexts, we want to make sure the system remains fast, reliable, and predictable. This quarter, our performance work focuses on two main areas:
- Increase capabilities and usage of evaluated implementations to improve performance: If we allow a limited set of reentrant functions in the evaluator, it will be possible to increase reliance on evaluated implementations, thereby leveraging the most performant part of the backend.
- Create a composition interpreter to improve performance: If we write an explicit interpreter for the composition language, the orchestrator will be more performant, and further performance-enhancing features will be easier to implement.
Alongside performance work, this quarter includes smaller but impactful efforts to reduce friction for people creating and maintaining functions. The goal is to make function creation faster and less repetitive, particularly for NLG-related work that supports Abstract articles.
- Make it easier to reuse compositions to increase speed of function creation: If we enable contributors to reuse whole composition blocks across functions, we will reduce repetitive work and significantly speed up the creation of new implementations, especially for similar linguistic functions.
- Improve product documentation to lower the barrier to function creation: If we define a clear documentation structure and entry points, function creators will more easily find relevant guidance and experience less friction when creating functions.
- Function Creation Pain Point Discovery: If we systematically identify the biggest friction points in the function creation experience, we can surface a small set of high-impact improvements that make creating and iterating on functions more efficient.
In parallel, this quarter focuses on taking Abstract Wikipedia from concept to an initial, minimal yet usable system. This work includes building a minimal Abstract Wikipedia experience, exploring how references could work in Abstract articles, and defining an initial approach for how Abstract Wikipedia content could be integrated into existing Wikipedias.
The goal is to enable early contributors to create, view, and experiment with Abstract articles, while learning what works and what needs adjustment before broader rollout.
- Abstract Wikipedia MVP: If we build and release an initial version of the Abstract Wikipedia platform, we can demonstrate the technical feasibility of the ecosystem working across multiple languages.
- Experiment with references to support article completeness: If we introduce a lightweight, local reference solution (via pop-ups) for Abstract Wikipedia, we can establish an initial citation mechanism to inform whether more complex solutions are necessary.
- Community Expectations & Early Fit Validation: If we engage with a small number of under-resourced Wikipedia language communities with a concrete example of abstract content, we can validate whether content created outside their local wiki is acceptable and identify conditions needed for adoption.
MVP spec. for integrating Abstract Wikipedia articles in Wikipedia: If we design how Abstract Wikipedia content is surfaced and presented within local Wikipedias, and learn how local communities make integration decisions, we can socialize the proposal, reach agreement, and confidently plan next quarter's development work.
Recent Changes in the software
This week, we've added new safeguards to prevent tests and implementations from becoming accidentally detached from their functions (T399934). Changing the parent function of a connected test or implementation is now prohibited and will show an error. To move a test or implementation, it must first be detached from its current function. This prevents outdated tests or implementations from appearing on the wrong function page or its implementation/test pages (on the right side). Coming soon: In a later deployment we will run a maintenance script to remove wrongly shown data on production.
Volunteers' Corner on February 9
The first Volunteers' Corner of the year will be on Monday, 9 February 2026 at 19:30 UTC. We plan to have our usual agenda: there will be time to ask questions and discuss all matters arising, and, if we have time, write a function together. Everyone is welcome to join us on meet.google.com/xuy-njxh-rkw.
Fresh Functions weekly: 25 new Functions
This week we had 25 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!
- arithmetical average of numbers (Z31047)
- generate real (float64) list from a function (Z31051)
- pass object if predicate is true (Z31065)
- enclose string from object (Z31078)
- real (float64) number range (Z31079)
- same float64 within tolerance (Z31090)
- same list of float64s within tolerance (Z31093)
- apply three-parameter function pairwise to 3 lists (Z31098)
- name of Wikidata item in toki pona (Z31104)
- fail with context (Z31109)
- increment by 1 (float64) (Z31111)
- decrement by 1 (float64) (Z31116)
- string from object (Z31120)
- square of float64 (Z31135)
- first grapheme cluster of String (Z31145)
- value of integral dimensionless Wikidata quantity (Z31161)
- Euler characteristic of polyhedron (Z31173)
- List of digits in base n (Z31177)
- days until next Meyboom (Z31188)
- generate html table from float64 numbers (Z31192)
A complete list of all functions sorted by when they were created is available.
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