Hi Denny,
Good thoughts!
I instead think much more collaboratively in my hope for Wikifunctions.
We live in a time when collaborative systems exist to talk, communicate,
teach and learn, all from thousands of miles away from each other.
For example: A language professor in Boston could help for 3 hours on a
Saturday afternoon to explain nuances of English rules to a classroom of
gifted Sri Lanka high school programmers.
I think we'll start to see more and more natural language meetups
happening where collaboration happens so that everyone's skills come to a
common table in Wikifunctions ... instead of a single person that might
know and understand it all.
"2 heads are much better than 1" - grandpa
"No one knows everything. But together, we know a whole lot." - Simon Sinek
Thad
On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 4:28 PM Denny Vrandečić <dvrandecic(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
The on-wiki version of this newsletter is
available here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-10-22
--
Common wisdom has it that skills with numbers and programming go
hand-in-hand. If someone is not good in mathematics, then they’ll be no
good in natural sciences, technology, or engineering. These skills go so
tightly together that people came up with a short acronym for their
conjunction: STEM
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology,_engineering,_and_mathematics>.
Given the frequent use of formulas in science, technology, and engineering,
this seems to make sense: if you have a good instinct for numbers, units,
and relations between quantities, then you will more easily intuit
equations and scientific laws. Galileo said
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Il_Saggiatore_(1623)>
that all science is written in the language of mathematics, after all.
So, how would that not be true for programming a computer? They are
called computers, after all, because they compute numbers so well. The
foundations of computers are the two numbers 1 and 0 and the very fast and
repeated processing of operations on long strings of these two numbers.
Last year, a paper in Nature
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8> actually tested
this wide-spread assumption. And, rather surprisingly, it discovered that
there is no correlation between STEM skills and the ability to learn to
program. Instead, it found a strong correlation between learning to program
and natural language aptitude.
I was very worried about the effort that we would need to undertake in
order to identify and recruit the right people for Wikifunctions: people
who can build a library of natural language generation functions for
hundreds of languages. Where would we find people skilled in both
under-represented languages and programming? Would there be enough of them?
Would they have the time to contribute to Wikifunctions or would they be
busy due to their rare combination of skills?
But as we can infer from the result in the Nature paper, this should
turn out to be easier than I initially feared. All we need to look for is
natural language aptitude, and through that we will cover all necessary
skills.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Lady Ada Lovelace
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace>, widely known as the
world’s first programmer, proclaimed that we would use programming to work
with art, and that numbers were not the only domain that computers could
work with. She likened programming to poetry. As a counter-point, Donald
Knuth <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth>, author of The Art of
Computer Programming
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming>,
estimated that only about 2% of the population are what he calls “geeks”,
with the mindset necessary for programming. He based this on his own
observations and his life-long attempts at educating and reaching out about
computer science.
But in many of Knuth’s writings, just as in many other introductions to
programming, you will start with examples in mathematics. The first example
in The Art of Computer Programming is Euclid’s algorithm
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_algorithm> to determine the
greatest common divisor, and even before you get to the first section
heading, entitled “Mathematical preliminaries”, he has already talked
about prime numbers and averages, asked you to give a mathematical proof,
and had you formulate a set-theoretic definition. Many other books
introducing programming are no different, often assuming fluency in at
least high school mathematics and sometimes beyond.
Is it possible that by relying so much on a strong mathematical
foundation the field of computer science has systematically, if
unintentionally, excluded a large number of people who would otherwise be
active contributors to the world of programming? Can we imagine a more
inclusive approach to programming?
This is the community we should be aiming to grow and foster for
Wikifunctions: one where we do not exclude people because of their lack of
certain skills, such as mathematics. We want to give everyone the ability
to effectively use functions, to create functions, to share and talk about
functions. We should allow for people with different skill sets to
collaborate and reach more than any one of us can do. That is, and always
has been, the special advantage of the Wikimedia projects. Let us make a
concentrated effort to be open and welcoming.
And I think we can do so. To give one example: when Jeff Howard
performed user research
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-09-24>
for Wikifunctions, he identified that many people didn’t really get what we
were aiming for with Wikifunctions. He cited existing Wikimedia
contributors such as Vigneron
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:VIGNERON> who said that, while
they were excited about using Wikifunctions, they didn’t think they would
necessarily contribute to it. They didn’t think of themselves as
“programmers”.
Earlier this year, we were talking about morphological paradigms
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-09-10>
to create plurals in English. After we published that newsletter, one user
saw it and created a function
<https://notwikilambda.toolforge.org/wiki/Z10148>, tests
<https://notwikilambda.toolforge.org/wiki/Z10150>, and an implementation
<https://notwikilambda.toolforge.org/wiki/Z10149> to do the same thing
in French. It was Vigneron!
It will be challenging. It will require new and inclusive ways of product
development to thoughtfully and intentionally ensure Wikifunctions is a
welcoming and inclusive community. But let us all commit to it. Let us be
mindful in the examples we choose, in the tutorials we write, in the
language we use.
I have not been mindful of this concern in many of my talks. My examples
were often drawn from mathematics, and the very first implementation I
presented was a recursive application of addition, using it to calculate a
product. I will aim to do better, and I plan to draw my examples from other
domains, in particular from natural language generation. And whereas I
fully expect us to quickly build up a library of functions in different
areas of STEM, which is of course important, let us be especially mindful
to not emphasize these to the exclusion of other areas, skill sets, and
interests.
The insight from the Nature paper is a gift to our project. Let us be
careful not to squander it.
(The weekly newsletter is always a collaborative effort by the whole
team. This week’s newsletter in particular benefitted from discussions,
contributions, editing, questions, and comments by James Forrester, Cory
Massaro, Aishwarya Vardhana, Adam Baso, and Nick Wilson. -- Denny)
--
The recording about Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia with a Russian
translation <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9NnGIXlvnI&t=20727s> at
the Russian Wiki-Conference
<https://ru.wikimedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8-%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F_2021>
in Moscow, Russia, organized by Wikimedia RU
<https://ru.wikimedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0>,
is now available on YouTube. Thanks to Gulnara for the translation!
The video recording from the Data Con LA 2021 Panel on Structured Data
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3KqygL7yqQ> with Wikifunction’s Denny
Vrandečić, Heather Hedden, and Karen Lopez, hosted by Joe Devon is now
online.
The Arab presentation slides about Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunction
at WikiArabia
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WikiArabia_2021_-_Wikifunctions_and_Abstract_Wikipedia.pdf>
by Houcemeddine Turki <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Csisc> are
now online on Meta. The video recording is expected to be online later.
Houcemeddine will also present an English version of that talk at
WikidataCon <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2021>
next week.
Talking about WikidataCon
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2021>! Next weekend
we celebrate the ninth anniversary of Wikidata! From the 29th to the 31st
of October we have three days full of program, community, and data. This
year’s WikidataCon is accessible online and will be co-hosted by Wikimedia
Deutschland <https://www.wikimedia.de/> and Wiki Movimento Brasil
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Movement_Brazil_User_Group>. You
can register for WikidataCon 2021 <https://pretix.eu/WDCon21/WDCon21/>
for free!
At WikidataCon, on Friday
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2021/Program/Day_1_-_Main_program>,
Tochi Precious of the Igbo community is joined by Denny Vrandečić in “Igbo
and Abstract Wikipedia - a conversation” hosted by Silvia Gutiérrez.
Also, we are looking forward to the fiftieth newsletter next week. Expect
something long in the making.
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