Denny Vrandečić

As the founder of Wikidata, Denny Vrandečić has thought a lot about how to better connect the world's knowledge.

His current project is Abstract Wikipedia, an initiative that aims to let anyone anywhere on the planet contribute to, and benefit from, the world's collective knowledge, in their native language.

It's an ambitious goal, but - inspired by the success of other contributor-driven Wikimedia Foundation projects - Denny is confident that community can make it happen

We talked about:

his work as Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation and his current projects: Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia

the origin story of his first project at Wikimedia - Wikidata

a precursor project that informed Wikidata - Semantic MediaWiki

the resounding success of the Wikidata project, the most edited wiki in the world, with half a million contributors

how the need for more expressivity than Wikidata offers led to the idea for Abstract Wikipedia

an overview of the Abstract Wikipedia project

the abstract language-independent notation that underlies Abstract Wikipedia

how Abstract Wikipedia will permit almost instant updating of Wikipedia pages with the facts it provides

the capability of Abstract Wikipedia to permit both editing and use of knowledge in an author's native language

their exploration of using LLMs to use natural language to create structured representations of knowledge

how the design of Abstract Wikipedia encourages and facilitates contributions to the project

the Wikifunctions project, a necessary precondition to Abstract Wikipedia

the role of Wikidata as the Rosetta Stone of the web

some background on the Wikifunctions project

the community outreach work that Wikimedia Foundation does and the role of the community in the development of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions

the technical foundations for his

how to contribute to Wikimedia Foundation projects

his goal to remove language barriers to allow all people to work together in a shared knowledge space

a reminder that Tim Berners-Lee's original web browser included an editing function

Denny's bio

Denny Vrandečić is Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation, leading the development of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. He is the founder of Wikidata, co-creator of Semantic MediaWiki, and former elected member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. He worked for Google on the Google Knowledge Graph. He has a PhD in Semantic Web and Knowledge Representation from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Connect with Denny online

user Denny at Wikimedia

Wikidata profile

Mastodon

LinkedIn

email: denny at wikimedia dot org

Resources mentioned in this interview

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikidata

Semantic MediaWiki

Wikidata: The Making Of

Wikifunctions

Abstract Wikipedia

Meta-Wiki

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/iB6luu0w_Jk

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 32. The original plan for the World Wide Web was that it would be a two-way street, with opportunities to both discover and share knowledge. That promise was lost early on - and then restored a few years later when Wikipedia added an "edit" button to the internet. Denny Vrandečić is working to make that edit function even more powerful with Abstract Wikipedia, an innovative platform that lets web citizens both create and consume the world's knowledge, in their own language.

Interview transcript

Larry:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 32 of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Denny Vrandecic. Denny is best known as the founder of Wikidata, which we'll talk about more in just a minute. He's currently the Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation. He's also a visiting professor at King's College Lo...