We are planning for our first office hour! The Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia office hours will be online events where the development team presents what they have been working on recently, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important related issues. They will be announced on the mailing list and in the newsletter, and are planned to take place every four to six weeks.
Our first office hour will be at 16:00 UTC on June 22, 2021, and will be in the Telegram channel and IRC Channel #wikipedia-abstractconnect (bridged together).
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Shani Evenstein Sigalov is teaching a course “From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, from Wikipedia to Wikidata” at Tel Aviv University. Shani prepared a video with Denny Vrandečić where they discuss Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. The video is available on YouTube.
In the interview Shani and Denny discussed some of the challenges in Wikipedia and Wikidata, and how they brought about the idea of Abstract Wikipedia. What the differences are between "Abstract Wikipedia", "Wikifunctions" and "WikiLambda"; What the current state of the project is; and how it all ties to the current Internet Ecosystem and things like AI and Machine Learning.
Next Monday, June 7th, at 15:00 Israel time (12:00 UTC), Shani will be hosting Denny in her course for a 45 mins Q & A session with her students via Zoom. This part of the class will be open to anyone interested in this topic, and you are welcome to either join them live and ask questions to Denny (after watching the pre-recorded interview), or watch it all later.
If you are interested in joining, please write Shani an email (shani dot even at gmail dot com) with the title "Joining the Q & A session with Denny", by Sunday June 6th at 20:00 UTC, and she will send you the Zoom link. This is to avoid Zoombombing.
If you are unable to participate live, but still want to engage, feel free to send in questions via email or leave them on Shani’s Facebook post. The session will also be recorded, so if you cannot make it to the live session, you will be able to watch it later on YouTube.
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Lucas Werkmeister, our esteemed colleague at Wikimedia Deutschland, who runs the Notwikilambda site as a volunteer, has set up the function evaluator and function orchestrator on Notwikilambda. He also created instructive videos of him doing so on Twitch:
These videos get automatically deleted after two weeks, i.e. in another week after publishing this newsletter.
The function orchestrator is the service that receives a function call, validates it, brings all necessary information together, calls the function evaluator as needed, and eventually will resolve function compositions. The function evaluator, on the other hand, takes code provided by Wikifunctions contributors and runs it in order to produce results for the orchestrator. Both of them are now set up on Notwikilambda, thanks to Lucas' work. Thank you!
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Boris Shalumov, host of the podcast “Chaos Orchestra” on the topic of Knowledge Graphs, has also interviewed Denny (among other guests, such as Sören Auer, a co-founder of DBpedia, Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc, or Daniel Schwabe, Professor at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and a few others), and they discuss Wikidata, Wikifunctions, and many other topics.
The podcast episode is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
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We'll also participate in the Arctic Knot conference this year. Community member Mahir Morshed will present on how to get the lexicographic data ready to be used in Abstract Wikipedia, and Denny will present on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions in general.
The conference will be free, fully online, and registration is open right now.
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On the development side, this week saw the start of the performance and security reviews, to make sure the architecture and implementation are on solid ground to take us to the launch later this year. They are both scheduled to go for two weeks. We are cooperating with the respective teams at the Wikimedia Foundation and are thankful for their support regarding these critical aspects of the new project.