Hi everyone,

Last week I attended and presented at the virtual Celtic Knot Conference https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2020. There were plenty of interesting talks, some live, some pre-recorded, all now available on YouTube; links are available on the “Main/Live program https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2020/Live_program” page, and the “Videos pool https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2020/Videos_pool” page.

I wanted to point out some of presentations and other things that might be interesting:

- You can see a demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIeJ_0aqgPg of what the Growth Team has been up to with their newcomer task work that our team has been supporting. - There’s a workshop-like demo of the Lexeme project on Wikidata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDM5QJAJzNc, which still has a long way to go, but already has a *lot* of data. - There’s also Lexeme-related tool in ToolForge called Ordia https://ordia.toolforge.org/, which has all sorts of nifty capabilities. A nice one is looking to see how many lexemes each language has https://ordia.toolforge.org/language/. - I had not previously heard of Wikidata Bridge https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Bridge, which aims to allow people to edit Wikidata from infoboxes! - A recent article from *Java Magazine* lists the 25 greatest Java apps ever written https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/the-top-25-greatest-java-apps-ever-written, and #6 is “Wikipedia Search”, even though the Java bit is mostly Elasticsearch and the “Wikipedia” part is mostly PHP. Still, it’s nice to be appreciated. - Amir has some nice ideas about how to make the Wikimedia Incubator better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdyzrDzD0qg. One positive side effect of his proposal might be better search on new wikis.

I don’t particularly recommend my talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi3-w9ne3zg since it is a short version of the same old overview of the basic kinds of text processing we can do for search—unless you want to see a few more examples in Irish (I don’t try to *pronounce* any of the Irish words, though, so it isn’t as entertaining as it could have been).

I already got a line on some Breton stop words, and I’m going to look into what we are doing for Breton as a 10% project.

—Trey

Trey Jones Sr. Computational Linguist, Search Platform Wikimedia Foundation UTC-4 / EDT