The on-wiki version of this newsletter is available at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2023-04-28
Wikimedia Endowment awards $1 Million grant to Abstract Wikipedia
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Endowment_logo.jpg>
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Endowment_logo.jpg>
Logo of the Wikimedia Endowment
We are happy to highlight the grant of one million US Dollar made by the
Wikimedia Endowment to support Abstract Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Endowment <https://wikimediaendowment.org/> is an investment
fund which uses a part of its gains to fund Wikimedia projects and the free
knowledge movement. Launched in 2016 to support the future of Wikimedia
projects, the Wikimedia Endowment is a permanent fund that supports
Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in times of uncertainty, and enables
long-term investments to support their growth and innovation. The endowment
is a safety net that helps protect Wikipedia now and into the future. The
Endowment was established as an independent organisation in 2022.
This year, for the first time, the Endowment is making some grants. We
congratulate the other recipients: Wikidata, the Machine Learning
programmatic work at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the offline reading
project Kiwix. The endowment made $3.2 million dollars available this year.
We express deep thanks to the Wikimedia Endowment for their support. You
can read more about the grant on a post on Diff
<https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/04/13/launching-the-first-grants-from-the-wikimedia-endowment-to-support-technical-innovation-in-wikimedia-projects/>
by
Phoebe Ayers, Chair of the Grantmaking and Community Committee of the
Wikimedia Endowment Board of Trustees.
The team’s manifesto, OKRs, and communication principles
Currently, the Wikimedia Foundation is going through the process of annual
planning for the upcoming financial year
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024>
(July
2023 to June 2024), receiving and incorporating feedback. We want to give a
huge shout out to the folks working on the process and implementing it. You
can join the conversation and the collaboration around the plan until
Friday 19 May 2023.
Our team is slightly outside of this process, since we already have a
development
plan <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Plan> that we are
following. Adding to this plan we now also published our team’s manifesto
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia_team/Single-page_manifesto>,
including our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR>), and our communication principles
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia_team/Communication_principles>
.
The manifesto summarises the why and what of our team and project. It is a
good, succinct summary of the work we are doing, and the motivation behind
the work. As we say in conclusion:
*“The ultimate objective of the Abstract Wikipedia effort is to make
knowledge more accessible and usable for everyone, regardless of their
language or background.”*
The objectives and key results that we have set ourselves define a number
of concrete metrics which we hope to achieve with Wikifunctions. They cover
the growth of the community, the usage and maintenance of the content on
Wikifunctions, and the diversity of contributors and multilinguality of
content. It feels very difficult to come up with meaningful numbers here,
but we have tried our best. We are sharing those numbers to keep ourselves
accountable, and we would be .
Finally, the Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions team is a distributed
team, and thus communication plays a heightened role for the success of our
team. The communication principles arise from the team’s values, and make
explicit the commitments we share for communicating with each other.
Although the communication principles only apply to our team and our
interactions with the community, we hope that by modelling our interactions
and by listing them publicly, we will also lead the Wikifunctions community
to adopt similar principles. We are hoping that the community that will be
participating on Wikifunctions will assume good faith, allow for an
environment where people can safely raise ideas and concerns, and where we
all remember to consider the human behind the user account. We have no
claim to novelty on these principles.
Volunteer’s Corner on Monday 8 May
Usually, the Volunteer’s Corner is on the first Monday of the month. Given
that this falls on May Day, the International Workers’ Day, we have decided
to move it to May 8th, at the usual time, instead. Bring your questions and
ideas!
The next Volunteer’s Corner will be on May 8th, 2023, at 17:30 UTC
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1683567008> on Jitsi at
meet.jit.si/AWVolunteersCorner
Oleg Parashchenko’s presentation on his experience implementing a natural
language generation system from earlier this week can be found recorded here
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ilzQV1TNeh3qtUdLqBC5-RVcvD8IitXD/view>.