Hello all,
Again, welcome!
Here’s my first email to this list with my new account and in my new role. Welcome everyone who signed up here, and I am so thankful that you are here. There is a lot we have to do, and I have already seen a few great discussion threads have started, and I will come to join them soon.
We are embarking on an ambitious journey, and we don’t know where we will end up, or how we will get there. Our goal is clear: we want to help more people to be able to share in more knowledge in more languages. This is a two-fold goal: in the end we want to be in a place, (1) where more people can read more articles in languages and contexts with which they are comfortable, and also (2) where more people will feel comfortable to contribute to the sum of all knowledge and make their voices heard as part of the global conversation. We want to build a meaningful contribution towards a world of more knowledge equity.
This will take time. Years, in fact. And we will take at least one major, but necessary detour, on the way to that goal, that will take us to the creation of a new Wikimedia project that will allow the collaborative creation of a catalog of functions, a form of knowledge assets that has not been a primary concern of the other Wikimedia projects so far.
We expected that our first milestone will be this new catalog, which in the proposal was called “Wikilambda”. So, in fact, we will not focus our development work much on Wikipedias and natural language generation and articles during that first part of our journey. And that is quite intentional: as you can see in some of the other threads, there is a huge amount of work that we need to make accessible for the project and figure out how to build on top. We don't want to reinvent wheels, if we can avoid it.
Right now, we don’t know yet how exactly we will implement the natural language generation, and how the abstract content will be stored and created and maintained. We are confident it can be done. But there are many open questions around that part, and we will need some time and partnership with experts inside and outside of the Wikimedia communities to work out which path we will explore. And I can see in the discussions on this list already some great suggestions and points - thanks for that!. But the goal is to create, with the library of functions, a foundation that is strong and robust enough to try out different paths, and even if we get it wrong one or two times, we will be able to pivot and explore other paths.
To sketch the timeline roughly: the first part of the project will be focused on launching the function wiki and integrating it with the other Wikimedia projects. Only once that is in place, we will start the development work on the natural language generation part, while keeping improving the functional foundation. This first part is expected to take at least a year.
This does not mean that we don't want work to happen on the natural language generation part. As is being discussed, it would be great to create an accessible overview of the current state of the art, and to make sure that lessons learned won't be forgotten when we start on this. It is time to survey the landscape of previous work so that we can then make, as a community, confident decisions in which paths to explore. This is a part where I am hoping for considerable input from you.
Also, we are starting with a small exploratory core team, much smaller than it was for Wikidata; me, Denny, as project lead, Adam Baso as Director, James Forrester as engineer, and Nick Wilson as documentation specialist. This core team is relying on the support from many others in the Foundation, from other movement bodies, and from the communities. We plan to look for more funding in order to support the work, particularly as things become increasingly concrete during the project development.
We are creating a first draft of a list of topics that we will have to discuss in the first few months, and we’ll send it out tomorrow. This list won’t be complete, and please make yourself heard so that we don’t miss important topics. Obviously, we can add topics at any time later too, but we want to try to set expectations and share insight in how we are planning to work on these topics.
We think of this as a collaborative project, and we will rely on the movement's expertise. We want to make sure that we listen and work together on this. We know this is crucial for the success of the project. We are committed to have our communication, discussions, and work be in the open, in order to get early feedback and early engagement. But this also means that not every single one of our messages will be polished, that we will surface disagreements within the team, that we will make mistakes, and that we want to be able to correct them and through interacting with you refine our work, our plans, and improve.
Please feel free to ask questions and comment on the rough outline for how this project will be working. Thank you!
I am super excited, and thank you all for being here, and looking forward to the next few years!
Stay safe, Denny