The Glass of Milk and the Monsters’ Feast
We need stories. Stories that we can tell each other or listen to, and that entertain us. We can learn from some stories. Sometimes we don’t fully understand a story, but it remains as an echo, a mood. From this mood, new ideas may arise and the desire to go deeper into the topic. Abstract Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikifunctions are not always easy to explain. Wikifunctions is a new project by the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind projects that bring Free Knowledge to the world, such as Wikipedia. Abstract Wikipedia is a larger idea that is about producing knowledge from strutured data and functions. Knowledge production from data is a fantastic concept; it’s fabulous. Here’s a fable.
Possibly in a dream, a fable came to us. At an unspecified time and place, not very long ago and not very far away, a pristine glass of milk quietly sat atop a table in a clearing at the edge of reality. Around it gathered an eclectic ensemble of mythological creatures. There were the Sphinx, the Minotaur, a Hydra with several heads, and a pensive, yet fiery Phoenix. They convened to share stories and indulge in a peculiar feast of cupcakes.
Each cupcake was a delicate masterpiece, decorated with symbols and equations. In the distance, the remnants of the Tower of Babel stretched into the clouds, its fragmented stones echoing the cacophony of lost languages. Hovering just above the monsters was the shadow of Kurt Gödel, silently observing the scene.
The Sphinx, ever the riddler, spoke first. “If one eats a cupcake, does the glass of milk remain a drink or will dunking the cupcake in the liquid make it a nourishing soup?”
The Minotaur grunted. “Milk is milk, whether we eat or not.”
“But,” interjected the Hydra with one of its heads, “does classifying milk as a drink or a soup depend on its observer? Or perhaps on the context in which it exists? And while we’re at it: What exactly is soup?”
The ardent Phoenix, who was a philosopher, added, “Gödel’s incompleteness theorems suggest that in any system, there are truths that cannot be proven within the system. Perhaps the classification of the milk with cupcakes is one such truth.”
Thunder sounded from far away. From the distance, the Tower of Babel loomed large, a monument to the hubris of understanding all. And just like that, there was silence. The monsters turned to gaze upon the tower, their feast momentarily forgotten. It was at this moment that the wind began to whisper tales of the remnants, debris, and rubble of Babel. In a hushed tone it murmured about a certain Abstract Wikipedia — a system of generated text based on knowledge repositories where the essence of information transcended language, aiming to restore what the Tower of Babel had shattered.
Imagine a knowledge base where every little bit of what humans know is represented through numbered items that each stand for something in the world: a person, democracy, an episode of a cartoon show, or a drink, or really anything that is a concept we can use to describe something we perceive or make up in our minds. To make these numbered items form sentences and let them speak, you need functions. These functions are little snippets of text-building cooking recipes expressed in computer code. They take the numbered items, transform and re-arrange them, to build text, weaving it together like a web — or as speakers of Latin would have said, a textulus.
Through numbered items and the application of functions you can express the structure of a text without describing it in a single human language. Then you can also use functions to make a text appear about the cultural significance of dunking baked goods into milk. The text may appear written in Mongolian or Igbo, potentially using items that speakers of French or Swahili created.
The monsters marvelled at this idea, for it promised a universal understanding beyond the chaos of tongues. One of the hydra‘s heads began talking about the local city library that the Argentine poet Jorge Borges had written about, but no one was really interested enough to listen. Besides, it was really hard to understand over the Minotaur‘s constant grunting.
When the Minotaur finally fell silent, the wind began to whisper again, this time about Leibniz’s dream of a universal language, his characteristica universalis. Finally, the glass of milk began to speak. “I am both drink and soup, depending on what you put inside me and contingent on the classification system you place me in. To you, mythological creatures, I am an unsolvable riddle — a reflection of your own incompleteness, much like the tower that crumbled under the weight of its own ambition.“
Gödel’s shadow wavered, a silent nod to the glass of milk’s explanation. He was overcome by a slight melancholy. He thought wistfully back to the time before he had taken up the profession of a ghost and when he himself had tried to assign unique natural numbers to symbols in formal languages — numbering items.
The monsters, for once, found themselves in quiet contemplation. Their feast continued, but with an undercurrent of existential wonder, the haunting presence of Babel’s ruins, and the dream of a language that could unite all.
The lesson resonated through the clearing: In the pursuit of knowledge, some truths remain beyond reach, yet the dream of a universal language persists, striving to rebuild what was once lost in Babel. Any classification system is necessarily incomplete and the mapping of knowledge across all languages is prone to conflicts due to undecidable problems. And yet it’s time to start working. If not now, when? If not us, who?