Episode 180: Denny Vrandečić
Episode description
🕑 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.