- Abstract-Wikipedia - lists.wikimedia.org

Newsletter #28: Welcome, Aishwarya and Carolyn!
by Denny Vrandečić 21 Apr '21

21 Apr '21

The on-wiki version of this newsletter is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-04-21 We are very happy to announce that we have been joined by Aishwarya Vardhana and Carolyn Li-Madeo. Aishwarya will join the team permanently, and Carolyn will support us over the course of the next few weeks. They are both exceptional UX designers and we are very much looking forward to working with them. I'll let them both introduce themselves with their own words: Aishwarya: Hello and namaste everyone! My name is Aishwarya (she/her). I am so happy to be joining the AW team to assist their efforts towards building a deeply multilingual and multicultural Wikipedia. I grew up in a household committed to preserving indigenous knowledge through art, culture, and oral tradition. At a young age I read about the anticolonial teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Dalit activist B.R. Ambedkar, and I believe this was the origins of my interest in knowledge production and knowledge equity. I studied Art and Art History and Product Design at Stanford University where I was an organizer for Black Lives Matter. I recently finished a 10 week course on an Indigenous Study Guide to Abolition at the Yellowhead Institute, found it revelatory, and have been thinking a lot about decolonizing systems! In this vein, I am invested in creating more connectivity between the worlds of technology, design, and social movements. I like to write about decolonizing design here <https://aishwaryavardhana.medium.com/>. I look forward to building with all of you. Favorite Wikipedia page: Critical Pedagogy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy> Carolyn: Hi! My name is Carolyn (she/her) and I’m excited to be supporting Aishwarya and the Abstract Wikipedia team for the next 6 weeks. I like to work on projects that empower people to question, learn and explore in new ways. In a previous life I was a reference librarian at a commuter college in my beautiful hometown of Brooklyn, NY, which is where I became passionate about free and usable access to knowledge via the internet. For the past four years I have been the designer of the Wikipedia iOS app, where it’s been a pleasure to design and refine products for mobile readers and editors. During my time with the Abstract Wikipedia team I hope to be a steward of design thinking in partnership with Aishwarya, as well as begin to develop a modular and human-centered design roadmap for the project. My favorite Wikipedia list is a List of sundial mottos <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sundial_mottos>, my favorite article is Women in climate change <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_climate_change>. We are positively thrilled to have them on board. In the coming weeks, we will share more about how we think about our UX challenges. We think that it is crucial for Wikifunctions to be truly accessible and approachable, in order to achieve our goal of democratizing access to code and functions. With Aishwarya and Carolyn joining us, we can finally work toward that piece of the puzzle in order to make Wikifunctions the project it could be.

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Newsletter #27: Selection of focus languages
by Denny Vrandečić 16 Apr '21

16 Apr '21

The on-wiki version of this update can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-04-15 A few weeks ago, we sent out a call for focus languages for improving the lexicographic extension of Wikidata, and so for Abstract Wikipedia. Over the last few weeks, we have received submissions from nine language communities: Bengali, Dagbani, Danish, Esperanto, French, Hausa, Igbo, Malayalam, and Russian. We want to thank all of these communities for their trust and all of the submitters for their work. The Wikidata team at Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia team at the Wikimedia Foundation have deliberated and discussed the options over the last few days. Following our own criteria <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Focus_languages…>, we chose the following four languages as focus languages (plus one stretch language). Lydia Pintscher <lydia.pintscher(a)wikimedia.de> and Denny Vrandečić <vrandecic(a)gmail.com> announced the languages at the closing event of the 30 Lexic-o-days <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events/30_lexic-o-days_2021> on Wednesday, 14 April: - Bengali is an Indo-European language (belonging to the Eastern Indo-Aryan branch), spoken in Bangladesh and India, there mostly in the eastern Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. Bengali is spoken by more than 220 Million native speakers, making it the fifth most-spoken language in the world. The Benagli Wikipedia has more than 100,000 articles and more than 1,700 active contributors. Like a few other languages in the region, it is written using the Bengali-Assamese script, an abugida and Brahmic script. Bengali is easily the most widely-spoken language and the largest Wikipedia community among the focus language communities (see more on the English Wikipedia's article <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language>) - Malayalam is a Dravidian language, spoken mainly in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Malayalam is spoken by more than 30 Million native speakers. The Malayalam Wikipedia has more than 70,000 articles and about 300 active contributors. Of note is also the Malayalam Wiktionary, which has more than 130,000 entries, outnumbering Wikipedia in Malayalam. Malayalam is written in the Malayalam script, which, like Bengali-Assamese, is an abugida and Brahmic script. The Malayalam community has been active on Wikidata, with numerous local identifiers and good usage of the data in Wikipedia (see more on the English Wikipedia's article <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam>) - Hausa is an Afroasiatic language (belonging to the Chadic branch) and an official language in Nigeria, Ghana, and Niger. The estimates about native speakers range between 50 and 150 million. It is the most important indigeneous lingua franca in West and Central Africa. Hausa Wikipedia has more than 8,000 articles and about 50 active contributors. Whereas Hausa was historically written in an Arabic alphabet, today it is mostly written in a Latin-based alphabet. The community has used Wikidata in infoboxes and has brought a number of modules and templates to Hausa (see more on the English Wikipedia's article <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausa_language>) - Igbo is a Niger-Congo language (belonging to the Volta-Niger branch) spoken mainly in south-eastern Nigeria with about 45 million native speakers. Igbo Wikipedia has about 2,000 articles and about 50 active contributors. Igbo is using a Latin-based script, although it has both an interesting history with the Nsibidi ideograms and possibly an interesting future with the Ndebe script. The community is using the ArticlePlaceholder extension in the Igbo Wikipedia (see more on the English Wikipedia's article <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_language>) - Dagbani is a Niger-Congo language (belonging to the Gur branch) spoken in northern Ghana. Igbo has about 3 million native speakers. Dagbani Wikipedia is still in Incubator, and already has more than 400 articles. It is written in a Latin-based alphabet. Whereas Dagbani didn’t fulfill some of our criteria, the community that applied was very enthusiastic. We regard Dagbani as our stretch goal: it will be instructive to learn whether we can achieve our goals even for such a small language community (see more on the English Wikipedia's article <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagbani_language>) Additionally, we will use English as a demonstration language, in order to showcase the developed features to a wider audience. We will continue to listen for input from all language communities and seek conversation with all communities. The point of the focus languages is to be able to reach out to some communities quickly, for testing out designs and prototypes, and to see if certain features also work beyond the languages the developers can test easily. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the process and who helped to run it smoothly!

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Newsletter #26: A mission statement for Wikifunctions
by Denny Vrandečić 08 Apr '21

08 Apr '21

The on-wiki version of this update can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-04-08 A few days ago we were asked for a mission statement for Wikifunctions, and we realized we didn’t have one yet. James Forrester then wrote a first draft, which the team slightly improved, intentionally inspired by the language used in the Wikimedia movement's vision: “A Wikimedia project for everyone to collaboratively create and maintain a library of code functions to support the Wikimedia projects and beyond, for everyone to call and re-use in the world's natural and programming languages.” I don’t expect this to be the final version, and you are all invited to improve it. It was pointed out to us that it is still a bit long and wordy. That said, let's take a closer look at the text as it is now: *“A Wikimedia project”*: Wikifunctions is a project <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_projects> by and of the Wikimedia movement, in the same sense as Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, and the other seven projects. In that sense, it is both a wiki website and a community. *“for everyone”*: When you think about the question of who will benefit from Wikifunctions, the answer is that we target everyone. There are practical limitations in reaching truly everyone: for example, a computer is a prerequisite for being able to benefit from Wikifunctions. That is different from e.g. Wikipedia or Wikivoyage, where the print-out of a page can be very useful without having to have a computer. But for a function to be useful, a computer will be needed in order to evaluate the function. Besides such limitations, we aim to be accessible <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_accessibility>, to be multilingual, and to run in many different contexts, both on- and offline. *“to collaboratively create and maintain”*: Collaborative creation and maintenance is the core tenet of the Wikimedia projects. We don’t want individuals to have "ownership" over a function or a set of functions, to control what is accepted to the project, or decide which changes would be welcome. This is a collaborative effort, and the default assumption is that everyone can contribute new function definitions, implementations for new functions, that everyone can improve the documentation and the test coverage of these. *“a library of code functions”*: This defines the new knowledge format that this project is addressing: code functions <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subroutine>. We are not talking about mathematical functions <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)>, but about functions for which we can provide executable implementations. We want to build a shared library of such functions that are connected with each other, that use each other, and that are built on top of each other. A single, comprehensive, common library also helps us to truly build on each other’s work. For example, if one searches the Web today for a function that calculates how many days have passed between two given dates, one can easily find faulty implementations that do not take leap days into account. By having one common library of functions to which anyone can contribute, we hope that we can increase the overall quality of code in the world. *“to support the Wikimedia projects”*: As with Commons and Wikidata, the founding, primary goal of Wikifunctions is to support the Wikimedia projects. We want to first focus on functions that are useful for the Wikimedia projects, that can help reduce the maintenance costs in the other projects, and unlock new capabilities for the projects that have not been possible before. *“and beyond”*: Alongside the primary goal, we don’t want to restrict the functions to only what is directly useful for the Wikimedia projects. On the contrary, we want to provide a comprehensive library of functions useful in many different areas: text processing, mathematics, natural sciences, health care, environmental studies, decision making, natural language generation, and many other areas. *“for everyone to call”*: Everyone will be able to go to Wikifunctions, find a function, enter the input arguments, and have the system evaluate the function and see the result. We plan that making these calls will be possible via direct evaluation on the Wikifunctions site, via inclusion on a Wikimedia project, and via API calls. We expect there to be substantial value to the world exposed through the API and its use on third party sites, tools, and apps, in the same way that Wikidata statements, Wikimedia Commons media files, and snippets of Wikipedia and other prose content projects are re-used around the Web. Using a function does not need to be a direct experience, but can also be embedded in another experience: for example, it should be easy for a spreadsheet user to use a function from Wikifunctions, or to allow third-party apps to use functions from Wikifunctions, to have Wikifunctions functions be exposed through voice interfaces or command lines, and many more ways. *”and re-use”*: For many people and use cases the above direct calls will be sufficient. But we cannot provide the computational resources for everyone and for all use cases. So we must make it easy for a user to take functions from Wikifunctions and re-use them, running them on computational resources they provide, or embed them in completely new contexts. As with all other Wikimedia projects, it should be very easy to download or export code from Wikifunctions for use elsewhere, as well as the simpler direct calls. *“in the world’s natural”*: Wikifunctions aims to support all the languages of our users – our editors, our functionaries, our translators, our readers, our re-users, and all the people we don't yet reach. It will be possible to run functions in Wikifunctions from an interface in the language of the user, but also the natural language generation libraries in Wikifunctions will target hundreds of languages. *“and programming languages.”*: Wikifunctions will allow people to write function implementations in a large number of programming languages. Unfortunately, adding a programming language to Wikifunctions will always be a bit of work, which will be somewhat of a bottleneck, and will require us to stage the deployment of programming languages. We will start with supporting Python and Javascript by the time Wikifunctions launches, but we aim to support many other languages in a relatively short period of time. Thanks to Moriel Schottlender <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mooeypoo> and Diana Montalion for prompting the question, and everyone on the team and beyond for thinking through it and helping with getting to a first draft of the mission statement.

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Newsletter #25: Phase γ completed
by Denny Vrandečić 02 Apr '21

02 Apr '21

The on-wiki version of this week's newsletter can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-04-02 When we started the development effort towards the Wikifunctions site, we subdivided the work leading up to the launch of Wikifunctions into eleven phases <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Phases>, named after the letters of the Greek alphabet. This week, we completed the third phase, Phase γ (gamma) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Phases#Phase_%CE%B3_(gam…> . With Phase α <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Phases#Phase_%CE%B1_(alp…> completed, it became possible to create instances of the system-provided Types in the wiki. With Phase β <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Phases#Phase_%CE%B2_(bet…>, it became possible to create Types on-wiki and to create instances of these Types. The goal of Phase γ was to provide all the main Types of the pre-generic function model <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Pre-generic_function_mod…> — Function, Implementation, Tester, Function call, Error, and so on. Some of these Types have quite a bit of 'magic' attached to them. For example, the screenshot below shows a Function call. The component for the Function call first asks you to choose one of the Functions defined on-wiki, then reads the chosen Function definition in order to get the definition of the Arguments of the Function, and finally creates the UX to allow you to enter the argument values. The screenshot for example shows a Function call to the Function “if”, taking a condition (which is just a literal “true” here), and then returning either the consequent (in this case the String “This result”) or the alternative (in this case the String “Not this one”). Given that the condition is true, this Function call would evaluate to “This result”. In order to demonstrate that we indeed completed Phase γ, we created the Function call from the screenshot, and it is stored as Z10006 on the notwikilambda <https://notwikilambda.toolforge.org/wiki/ZObject:Z10006> site. As ever, our thanks and a shout out to Lucas Werkmeister for setting up and maintaining notwkilambda in a volunteer role! We cannot yet evaluate a Function call, only write them. The next three phases we will work on making evaluation possible in different forms. We are also aware that the UX needs design work; we are intentionally keeping the UX very basic for now, as we are in an early phase. We will have major updates on that in the following few weeks. Alongside the main new feature, there have been plenty of other improvements throughout the code base. We made progress on the back-end components that will respond to requests to evaluate the code. We improved the WikiLambda extension in terms of refactoring the code, particularly through a Data Access Object for ZObjects. The front-end is currently in the middle of a refactor to support new features easier. We now display some error messages in the UX, instead of failing silently. We have components that allow entering code, for use in creating Implementations. We improved considerably the experience and scalability when creating new objects and assigning them a fresh ZID. Outside the code changes themselves, we also had the Logo concept vote <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-03-17>, and folks from the Security team and the Performance team each embedded with us for a few weeks, as we prepare for readiness reviews with regards to these aspects. Also the Outreachy interns finished their work <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-03-25> and delivered their report. In fact, we closed 64 tasks in this phase - more than in the previous two phases together. Finally, there are also some bugs, and we are tracking known ones on the Phabricator task board. We are still actively working on the Function call component. If you encounter new bugs, please do raise them. Either let us know, or create a new bug report in the column “To triage” so that we know to review them. We are now moving on to Phase δ (delta) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Phases#Phase_%CE%B4_(del…>. The goal of this phase is to allow evaluating those Function calls which can be done via built-in implementations. The implementations of the built-ins have already landed a little ahead of the phase start, so one major goal of this phase will be to wire up the MediaWiki site with the WikiLambda extension to the middleware function-orchestrator <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/mediawiki/services/function-…> service. This will also make setting up an environment and running tests more complicated, but of course closer to the reality of how Wikifunctions will operate. At the end of this phase, we will be able to call one of the built-in implementations, such as for the demonstration function call to “if”. This is a small change to the original plan. We had pulled the native function calls forward <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-02-18>, but we are now noticing that we pulled them one phase too early - they should be the fifth, not the fourth phase. We will devote Phase δ to the built-in implementations, and then allow for native function calls in Phase ε, when we will wire the function executors <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/mediawiki/services/function-…> up with the orchestrator. This will be followed by Phase ζ, which will allow for function composition. These three upcoming phases (δ, ε, ζ) will develop the three different ways to express implementations for functions, which will be the beating heart of the technical features that Wikifunctions will provide. There will still be tons of other things that need to be developed and improved, without question — but these will be the main steps towards providing a glimpse into what Wikifunctions will bring to the Wikimedia movement and beyond. I want to end with a big shout out to the whole team, and to the volunteers who have contributed patches — in particular Arthur P. Smith, Gabriel Lee, Lucas Werkmeister, Thiemo Kreuz, DannyS712  — and give a pointer to the Focus languages submission process <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Focus_languages>. The submission deadline is on 7 April. Interested people are welcome to add your own submissions and attend the Q&A session regarding the Focus languages process <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events/30_lexic-o-days_2021> which is part of the 30 Lexic-o-days of Wikidata.

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Assigning languages to ZIDs
by Denny Vrandečić 31 Mar '21

31 Mar '21

How would you assign languages to ZIDs? Currently the idea is to reserve the four digit ZIDs for languages. I would like to start with the languages that are user interface languages for MediaWiki (but there's enough space to extend this considerably later). But how to turn them into numbers? The best way I can come up with is to take the language codes, sort them alphabetically, and take that for the first set, and then, when more come in, add them chronologically. Let's have that as the strawman proposal, but maybe someone can come up with a smarter idea?

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Newsletter #24: Outreachy intern analysis of Scribunto modules across wikis
by Denny Vrandečić 25 Mar '21

25 Mar '21

This week's update can be found on-wiki here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-03-25 -- Back in December 2020, we introduced the Abstract Wikipedia list to Aisha and Jade, Outreachy interns participating in Abstract Wikipedia / Wikifunctions data science.[1] We want to share the exciting results of their work. During the past few months, Aisha and Jade developed a Vue.js web application to help people find user generated code across the MediaWiki Scribunto modules written in Lua. Their creative approach involved a complex data pipeline using Wikimedia Cloud Services which analyzed the usage and similarity of code across different language editions of Wikipedia and its sibling projects. This approach is intended to aid users as they consider the problem space of consolidation of certain types of code into pure, re-usable functions in the Wikifunctions project. The application can be found here: https://abstract-wiki-ds.toolforge.org We hope you enjoy the following 3 minute demo video of the web-based tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M31scvrfGdE Here is the longer 41 minute audio discussion with Aisha and Jade and the rest of the Abstract Wikipedia team about their data science work: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AAbstract_Wikipedia_D… You can review the extensive data analysis and pipeline development and web-based tool material, including Jupyter notebooks (on the PAWS public notebook system) and code hosted in Wikimedia GitHub, starting from here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Data#Get_important_modul… We want to thank Aisha and Jade for their excellent work during the internship, and we hope they return in the future. If you'd like to collaborate on the data pipeline, further analysis, or the web-based tool, please do drop a line on the abstract-wikipedia mailing list and we'll see if we can connect on Phabricator and GitHub to grow this work further. We believe the approach taken here, if further generalized, may also be of interest as we look deeper at the natural language constructs across Wikipedias and sibling projects for Abstract Wikipedia, and as more folks explore topics like global templates as well. We'd like to thank Srishti and all of the Wikimedia Foundation's Developer Advocacy unit for their support in Outreachy efforts and Wikimedia Cloud Services capabilities, as well as for the encouragement from Isaac in Wikimedia Foundation's Research unit to foster this collaboration with both Aisha and Jade - they formed a productive partnership and as the mentoring group we were delighted to work with Aisha and Jade. We're delighted to have such a supportive global movement and knowledge network helping to increase the impact and awareness of this valuable initiative. -The Abstract Wikipedia Team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia P.S.: We also wanted to let you know that an overview of how all the pieces fit together is now published in the April 2021 edition of the Communications of the ACM: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/4/251343-building-a-multilingual-wikipe… [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/abstract-wikipedia/2020-December/0003…

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Newsletter #23: Logo concept voting closes, and 30 Lexic-o-days opens
by Denny Vrandečić 17 Mar '21

17 Mar '21

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-03-17 -- Logo concept vote Earlier this week, the voting for the logo concept for Wikifunctions <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Wikifunctions_logo_conce…> concluded. We are very happy to have seen so much participation in the process — to be honest, I was personally worried whether there would be enough participation or not. The last time we started Wikimedia projects was in 2012: Wikidata <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page> was started from scratch, and Wikivoyage <https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page> moved to the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikivoyage came with an already existing community, and for Wikidata we presented the project in many face-to-face events as it was getting started, talking with many members of the global Wikimedia community. The two projects had their logo votes in 2012 and 2013, where Wikidata saw 493 voters, Wikivoyage saw 521 voters. I was worried that we would fall short of both numbers: due to global events, there was no Wikimania at which we could have explained the importance of Wikifunctions in person. Wikimania 2012 was a huge boost for Wikidata, a place where we could share excitement, answer questions, and find our first Wikipedia communities willing to try out Wikidata. For Wikifunctions, we did go to many virtual events, but we didn’t know how successful these would be in creating excitement and helping people to understand what we are doing. I am thus extremely pleased to see that 561 voters participated in the Wikifunctions logo concept vote, casting 1051 votes on the 22 logo concepts which were taken from the almost fifty submitted proposals and variants. The race was very tight for the first week, and then one proposal started gathering more momentum, eventually displaying a quite comfortable lead over the runner-up. Proposal 11 had 124 votes, and thus is the community favorite. It is followed by Proposal 5 with 112 votes and Proposal 9 with 107 votes. (We have vetted the votes of the winning proposal, but we did not go through all votes on all proposals beyond that, so numbers are not final.) I am personally saddened that my favorite proposal <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Wikifunctions_logo_conce…> not only didn’t win, but in fact ended up not fourth, but fourth from the bottom of the list. We have now forwarded the results to the Legal department of the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to screen the top logo concept. After this, we will let the design team have a pass on the logo. We expect that this whole process will take four to six weeks, depending on possible complications, and hope to be able to announce the refined logo by the end of April. Congratulations to user NGC 54 <https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilizator:NGC_54> for creating the winning proposal! Congratulations to Jon Harald Søby <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by> and Steven Liu Yi <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stevenliuyi> for having their logos perform so well! Thanks to everyone who has submitted a proposal, and to everyone who has participated in the contest. 30 Lexic-o-days The Wikidata team have begun a festival of events bringing focus around lexicographic data on Wikidata, which will be a key part of the future of Wikifunctions and particularly Abstract Wikipedia. Check out the 30 Lexic-o-days <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events/30_lexic-o-days_2021> program, and if you want to see something happen there, feel free to join in or to suggest it! The submissions for focus languages for Abstract Wikipedia and the lexicographic extension for Wikidata are on-going. We currently have seven applications, and the last day to apply is April 7: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Focus_languages During the 30 Lexic-o-days, we will also have Question and Answer sessions regarding the Focus language selection. There will be two of them to accommodate two different time zones: March 30th, 17:00 UTC, and April 6th, 03:00 UTC Other “XLSemanal”, the most widely circulated magazine in Spain, had an article about Abstract Wikipedia: https://www.xlsemanal.com/conocer/tecnologia/20210225/wikipedia-20-aniversa… (it is mostly a translation of the article published earlier this year in the German magazine “Der Spiegel”) We presented Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions at the Alan Turing Institute <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing_Institute>, opening the Knowledge Graph Interest Group. A video will be made available later.

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Newsletter #22: Vue.js and Abstract Wikipedia
by Denny Vrandečić 11 Mar '21

11 Mar '21

The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-03-10 You may know that we've been building the Wikifunctions UX with the frontend framework Vue.js <https://vuejs.org> since we started. Vue.js has been selected as the frontend framework <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T241180> for all future Wikimedia development efforts, and we've been enjoying the benefits of the framework's design. We wanted to share with you that we've extended the team with support from two people from the consultancy This Dot <https://www.thisdot.co/> for the next several months. They will both be working part time with the Abstract Wikipedia team on Wikifunctions, helping us to develop a high performance and scalable Vue.js UI layer. They may also support other teams with Vue related auditing and support as needed. Simone and Lindsay have been onboarding over the last two weeks, and we're most thankful for their expertise. In their own words: Simone Simone is a self taught developer currently living in Wales (UK), but originally from sunny Naples (Italy). He studied business and management, obtaining a degree at Swansea University in 2011, but quickly fell in love with developers. Simone started his career as a Junior Software Engineer in 2012, and has since then progressed to become a Consultant working at This Dot helping creating high performance teams, mentoring developers across the globe, providing corporate training and supporting apprentices in their first steps of their IT career. During his career Simone has gained experience in many technologies (both frontend and backend), but he has recently found his framework of choice in VueJS, where he is a very active community member. Simone's free time is spent with his lovely family, building with legos, or cooking some delicious Italian food. When the kids are in bed, he also likes to write blog posts <https://www.zelig880.com> and material for the .Net Magazine, and join numerous online meetups and conferences like vuemeetup.com and JavaScript Marathon <https://dev.to/thisdotmedia/free-vuejs-training-during-javascript-marathon-…> . Simone wanted to share this message with everyone: "I have a very positive attitude in solving complex problems and always see the glass half full. My wife usually says that my eyes really look at the world differently. This 'can do' attitude has helped me since the day I decided to move to the UK with just 170£ in my pocket, and it has been my best companion ever since. I like to invest any time I have to help people that are trying to get into development and help them change their lives." Lindsay Lindsay is a full stack Software Engineer at This Dot from Portland, OR. She has always had a passion for web development, building community sites and projects with PHP. She started her career as an IT professional in 2015, but in 2017, she switched career paths from IT administration to development. She focused on learning Vue.js and Node, while exploring the greater development community around them. Her curiosity drives her to continue learning new languages and frameworks, and applying that knowledge in her work. Lindsay graduated from Western Governors University in 2020 with a Bachelor's in Software Development, with a focus on C# applications. In previous projects, Lindsay has worked across the development stack, including on the database, backend services with many different languages, and frontend with tools like React and Vue. In her free time, Lindsay enjoys spending time with her family, writing, singing, and building the occasional side project. Lindsay previously performed with a community choir, and still likes to keep up her singing voice. Lindsay also has a passion for science fiction and fantasy, and enjoys both writing and reading as much as time allows. She is also a host on the podcast Views on Vue <https://devchat.tv/podcasts/views-on-vue/>, a show focused on the community surrounding the Vue.js framework. Please join us in welcoming Simone and Lindsay! -The Abstract Wikipedia Team Ongoing: - The vote for the Wikifunctions logo concept <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Wikifunctions_logo_conce…> is ongoing until Monday, March 15. - Submissions for communities to join as focus languages <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Focus_languages> for Abstract Wikipedia and new developments on Wikidata are open until April 7.

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Newsletter #21: Focus languages for improvements to the lexicographic extension of Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia
by Denny Vrandečić 03 Mar '21

03 Mar '21

The on-wiki version of this newsletter is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-03-03 Hello all, The Wikidata team at Wikimedia Deutschland will be working on improvements to the lexicographic data part of Wikidata during this year. The Abstract Wikipedia team at the Wikimedia Foundation will be working on the generation of natural language text for baseline Wikipedia articles in the next few years, and on functions in Wikifunctions to work with lexicographic data. For these cases, it would be beneficial to focus on a small specific set of languages at first. Participating communities will hopefully find that this project leads to long-term growth in Wikipedia and Wiktionary in and about their language. Lydia and Denny would like to choose the same focus languages for both of the teams, as this is beneficial for both projects to have this aligned. We will be working closely together with the focus communities over the next few years. This means that features will land first in these languages and we will have particularly active feedback channels. We are looking for communities that are open to trying out new things. The decision of which languages should be the focus languages should be done together with the wider communities. In particular, we would like to make the decision with a promising self-selecting community. This worked very well for Wikidata, where the focus projects were self-selected. We will use English as a demonstration language and two or three other languages as focus languages. English is chosen as it is easy to demonstrate to a wide audience and is a working language for both development teams. For the focus languages, we want to work with an active and enthusiastic community or seed of a community over the next few years on these projects. In order to be fully transparent, we have compiled a number of detailed other criteria <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Focus_languages…> we would like to use to guide us in our decision, but this assumes that there are communities to choose from. None of these criteria are set in stone, and we are happy to discuss them, remove some if they are not good ideas, or add others if we missed something. Regard this as a strawdog proposal. For example, Mahir Morshed <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mahir256> came up with a complementary set of criteria on Phabricator <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T274373#6821602>, which we will consider in the selection as well. We will have Q&A office hours for discussion, and are open to comments via wiki <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Lexicographical_data/Focus_lang…> or email. We are thinking of a two-pronged approach: - first, to call for communities to propose themselves to work with us; - second, to look at the data and see which languages would be good candidates. We don’t want to set too strict a process. We would like the second prong of the approach to go on throughout the whole process to help us come to a good understanding of the options. For the first prong, we would like the candidate seed groups to describe and nominate themselves on wiki, following a short form <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Focus_languages…>. Nominations should be submitted by April 7, and the decision will be made by April 14 by the teams taking your comments into account. If we notice that self-nominations are not happening, we will try to engage with language communities directly. It is possible that the two teams will choose different candidates, although we will try to avoid that. We are looking forward to hearing about what you think of this proposal. Please comment on the talk page on wiki <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Lexicographical_data/Focus_lang…> . Lydia and Denny

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Newsletter #20: Logo concept voting will start on Monday
by Denny Vrandečić 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

The on-wiki version of this update can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-02-25 -- The logo concept <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Wikifunctions_logo_conce…> submission phase has come to a close, and we received 46 submissions and variants <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia/Wikifunctions_logo_…>. I am deeply impressed with the submissions, and am looking forward to the vote. Some of the submissions have a number of variants, and in order to avoid the decoy effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect>, we would like to remove concepts that are too similar to each other. For Wikidata, we made the decision inside the team about which variants to choose, and we also dropped a number of the proposals. Here, I would like us to make the decision together, but in order to ensure that things move on, we’ll take a look at the status of the discussion on Monday and then the team will finalize the exact candidates. We also plan to have short notes on each submission (3-4 sentences), so we are asking the submitters (but also everyone else who wants to join in) to write short notes for each of the candidates. A short explanation can do wonders for making a logo more interesting (my second favorite example is the seemingly simple FedEx logo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx#Logo>). [image: Screenshot 2021-02-25 at 12.46.10.png] This time can also be an opportunity to remove submissions from the pool, or to flag other concerns and make them explicit in the notes, so that voters are aware. This would include similarities to other, existing logos, and we should decide whether we still want to keep the candidate or drop it. We will open the voting on Monday afternoon Pacific time, and keep it open for two weeks until 15 March. Everyone eligible can vote for as many different candidates as they like, and the logo with the most votes will then be submitted to the legal department in order to scrutinize it, and to the design department to refine it. To give an example of how far the refinement could go: this was the winner of the Wikidata logo voting, and it was refined by using a different ratio on the bar and changing the wordmark considerably. We will take similar freedoms with the logo concept this time around too. In summary, here are the next steps: until Monday, let’s agree on the set of logo concepts to vote on, and decide on the notes to accompany them. On Monday, we will then start sending out messages inviting people to vote. I am very excited to see what will be in the corner of our new Website, on t-shirts, stickers, and badges. And thank you all for joining us in this exciting process!

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