Team meeting in San Francisco

Last week saw our annual team meeting, and this time we gathered for the first and last time in the current office space of the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. Some of us met for the first time, and we used the meeting to get to know each other, and to sketch out our plans for upcoming work on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions.

We improved our shared understanding of the project and how we work together, and one of the results is our plan for this quarter, which we present below.

We also had interesting discussions around how Abstract Wikipedia could look like in the future. We want to capture some of the thoughts from that session in more detail in an upcoming update, as it opens many questions for how Abstract Wikipedia can flourish and grow as a project that is rooted and anchored in the work of our contributors.

It was a bittersweet opportunity for the team to see the current office, as the Wikimedia Foundation will move to a smaller office space in the fall as our lease ends.

Quarterly planning

One of the results of the meeting was to establish a plan for the current quarter. Here is a quick overview of the main tasks we will be working on:

• Visual prototype for Wikipedia integration: based on our ongoing research, what could designs for the integration of Wikifunctions into Wikipedia look like? This will also be used to improve cross-functional collaboration and to identify next steps towards building Abstract Wikipedia.
• Type support for identity / enumeration: supporting types that have a specific set of values, such as grammatical number in English (plural, singular), cases in Russian (nominative, dative, etc.), signs for integers (positive, negative, and neutral), or months in the year (January, February, etc.). This should allow us to create all types that are necessary to access lexicographic data in Wikidata, which would come next.
• Improve production monitoring: so we have an easier time understanding when something goes wrong, or where the time in orchestration and evaluation is going. This will also inform future work on caching, which is critical for integration into Wikipedia.
• Improve integration with MediaWiki core tests and other test support: changes to core are currently not automatically tested against the WikiLambda extension. We will work on changing that.
• Demos in a box: provide resources that help community members to give presentations about Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia.
• Wikifunctions’s UX drives user behavior to increase linguistic accessibility: changes to the UX that make it easier for users to provide missing translations and a better experience in other languages than English.
• DB table for expanded metrics support: allow for collecting more metrics about Wikifunctions.
• Help users debugging implementations by providing more metadata: function calls are currently a bit of a black box. We want to provide some more insight into what is going on inside a function call, and this might help contributors fix issues more easily.

An overview of this quarter’s work can be seen in a brand new Phabricator board. All the tasks listed above are represented in the column “Epics for this quarter”.

Recent Changes in the software and Function of the Week

Because this newsletter is already so long, and due to the team meeting and the Hackathon, we are skipping these sections this week.

Volunteers’ corner on May 6

On Monday, May 6, 2024, we are going to have our Volunteers’ corner at 17:30 UTC. Bring questions and curiosity! We will give an overview of recent changes, ongoing work, have ample opportunities to answer questions and discuss concerns by the community, and if there’s time, also work collaboratively on a function.

Abstract Wikipedia team at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn

This weekend sees the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 in Tallinn, Estonia. James Forrester of the Abstract Wikipedia team will be there and if you want to discuss anything about Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia, feel free to approach him. (Also, he’s an awesome fellow to chat with even if you don’t.)