The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-07-12
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Welcome, Amin!
As Aiswharya has rotated
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-06-30> over
to the Trust and Safety Tool team, Amin Al Hazwani has joined us as our new
Designer. Amin has been working with open projects for a long time, and
joined the Wikimedia Foundation in August 2021. He previously worked with
the Trust and Safety Tool team.
As usual, I will let Amin introduce himself in his own words.
Hello everyone! My name is Amin, and I'm very excited to join Abstract
Wikipedia.
I’m an Italian designer with Syrian roots, currently living and working in
Milan, Italy. I have an itch for foreign languages, and that brought me to
Bolzano, a city surrounded by the Italian Alps, where I attended the
trilingual (English, German, and Italian) Faculty of Design and Art.
In 2010, I founded and ran my own design studio working between Bolzano,
Milan, and Berlin. Then, I joined Mozilla in Berlin, where I was one of the
founding members of the design systems initiative, a program that supported
the launch of the new Firefox in November 2017. Later I became a member of
the Firefox for Android team, working on experimental browsers. Together we
built and shipped Firefox for Amazon’s media players and smart displays.
In 2019, I moved back to Italy and worked at Accurat, a design and
development studio based in Milan and NYC focused on data visualizations.
We are looking forward to working with Amin and to seeing him shape
Wikifunctions. Please join me in welcoming Amin to the team!
Cory in residency
Our own Cory Massaro, software engineer at large at the Abstract Wikipedia
project and lead of the natural language generation workstream, is out for
a month-long art residency with arthereinstabul
<https://www.arthereistanbul.com/home> in Istanbul.
arthereistanbul is an organization founded in 2014 by Syrian artists. The
activities of the organization encompass a broader conversation between
artists and cultural practitioners regardless of nationality. The
organization maintains a space in İstanbul for artists to work, to promote
intercultural exchange, and to engage in activism.
Andrea Zambrano and Cory form the duo Tecnologías Silvestres. Andrea is a
painter who has worked with popular education, feminist activism, and
ecosystem conservation in Ecuador and Mexico on projects which denounce
violence towards women, girls, and trans people; exploitation by mining and
petroleum interests; and state and market policies which loot and exploit
communities.
Their project "UMBRAL" concerns the bridge / gateway / threshold as spaces
of encounter, transition, or tension between spaces and times. They
investigate how hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces meet in bridge /
gateway spaces. They ask, "What is hegemony; who perpetrates it?" "How can
we strengthen counter-hegemonic forces?" "What are the hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic effects of emerging technologies?"
The platform the Abstract Wikipedia team is building intends to serve
Wikipedia's least-resourced language communities. It is thus foundationally
bound up in issues of digital colonialism and geographic, linguistic, or
cultural privilege, and has to adopt an anti-hegemonic approach in order to
succeed. This residency is a deliberate step to foster an egalitarian,
decolonial, and empathetic ecosystem.
While Cory is in Istanbul, and if you happen to be near enough: if you are
interested in Abstract Wikipedia, knowledge equity, curbing digital
colonialism, and / or a language which is underrepresented on Wikipedia,
he'd love to talk to you! You can reach out to him at cory.massaro(a)gmail.com
.
Other and Workstream updates
We are hiring for a Quality and Test Engineering position! Apply here
<https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/4321901?gh_src=0dcd8f191us>,
and for more information see the last newsletter
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-06-30>.
Apologies for the delays in the newsletter, but I was traveling and got
COVID.
Workstream updates (as of June 24)
Great progress on merging big changes on typed lists Performance:
- SRE ServiceOps have reviewed the Performance Metrics document and
approved the metrics
- Made great progress on end-to-end testing using the Beta Cluster and
migration of the tester pipeline from orchestrator into MediaWiki
NLG:
- Drafted initial design document describing templating language
Meta-data:
- Implemented supporting Vue / Vuex components for metadata dialog and
built initial presentation of metadata dialog (v. 0.1)
Experience:
- Merged cross-repo schemata+WikiLambda+orchestrator clean-up patches
- Merged v0 of tester and implementation table interfaces
- Finished text with fallback implementation for fallback title
- [DESIGN] Started work on editing typed lists