[1] First conceived in 2020 (with a precursor proposal in 2013), Abstract Wikipedia has been under active development ever since, with the related project of Wikifunctions launched in 2023.

[5][6][7] In April 2021, Vrandečić published an overview of the system in the computer science journal Communications of the ACM.

[9] According to an evaluation by four Google Fellows working on the project, it was at a "substantial risk of failure" due to its poor technical plan.

[9] The Google Fellows recommended that Abstract Wikipedia be decoupled from Wikifunctions, that Wikifunctions refine MediaWiki's support for programming in Lua rather than having a completely new language, and that Abstract Wikipedia converge on a unified approach to natural language generation (NLG) that builds on open source software if possible.

[9] The Wikimedia Foundation staff responded to this report by completely rejecting the idea that Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions could be separated, and accusing the Google Fellows of making "fallacies and false comparisons".