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.