The on-wiki version of the newsletter is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2020-12-18

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This is the last newsletter for 2020. We will take a break in writing the newsletter until January. We wish everyone happy holidays and a good start into 2021, a year which will see the launch of a new Wikimedia project. Yay!

Last week saw the publication of a conversation between Heather Ford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Ford, Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Denny Vrandečić. They discuss the potential advantages but also ethical challenges that Abstract Wikipedia will face: Automated Facts, Data Contextualization and Knowledge Colonialism https://bigdatasoc.blogspot.com/2020/12/automated-facts-data-contextualization.html

We presented Abstract Wikipedia at the Wikimedia Ukraine 2020 conference https://ua.wikimedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%86%D1%96%D1%8F_2020. A recording of the presentation is available here, using slides translated to Ukrainian: video https://youtube.com/watch?v=tYMQVpUuKks&t=6910

There was also a talk at the Fall 2020 edition of the SMWCon https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2020 in Vienna. That talk went through the history of Semantic MediaWiki to Wikidata and was focused more around the usage of Semantic MediaWiki as a knowledge tool - and how a library of functions can be helpful with that. keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EosGUoucthg

SMWCon also featured a panel with Lydia Pintscher http://www.lydiapintscher.de/about.php, Markus Krötzsch https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Markus_Kr%C3%B6tzsch/en, and others, discussing the interaction between Semantic MediaWiki and Knowledge Representation - a topic that will be crucial also for Abstract Wikipedia: panel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Lp4azOUX1Y

Happy new Gregorian year!