Episode 180: Denny Vrandečić

🕑 2 hours 6 minutes Denny Vrandečić is the Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as a visiting professor at King's College London. He is the is main creator of the Wikimedia sites Wikidata and Wikifunctions and co-creator of the MediaWiki extension Semantic MediaWiki; he also leads the project to create the so-called "Abstract Wikipedia". This is his second time on the podcast. Links for some of the topics discussed: SPINACH ("SPARQL-based Information NAvigation for CHallenging real-world questions on Wikidata") Wikidata Walkabout Wikifunctions "Sketching a path to Abstract Wikipedia", Wikifunctions update, December 2024 Abstract Wikipedia/Google.org Fellows evaluation, December 2022 Abstract Wikipedia/Google.org Fellows evaluation - Answer, December 2022 Abstract Wikipedia Wikipedia article "Large Language Models, Knowledge Graphs and Search Engines: A Crossroads for Answering Users' Questions" (2025 paper by Aidan Hogan, Xin Luna Dong, Denny Vrandečić and Gerhard Weikum) RSS Wikipedia article (stands for RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) Interestingly, after we finished recording this episode, Denny showed me, on a screenshare, some of the current capabilities of LLMs; we asked it different questions, and one of the LLMs (I think from the "Llama" family) stated that the name of this podcast was "My Favorite Dystopia". I have no idea where that came from, but it's an eerily apt description of this particular episode, with its discussion of a possible (though maybe unlikely) replacement of Wikipedia with a massive set of function calls. Somehow the AI knew.