Katherine, thank you for the warm welcome and your kind words!
I am very happy to be given the opportunity to start this new project, and
deeply honored by the trust and confidence of the Board and the Foundation.
Thanks to the many who have listened to me talking about this project in
the last few years, read my papers and plans, commented on them,
scrutinized them, and offered encouragement, criticism, and advice. Thanks
to everyone who expressed their support and raised their concerns on the
proposal page on Meta [1]. It is thanks to you that the Board was confident
enough to make this decision.
There is a lot of work in front of us, and I will continue to rely on your
guidance and collective wisdom. We will need to foster a new community.
Just as with Wikidata, I hope that some of you will become active in the
new community, and I also want to make sure that we will be welcoming to
new contributors. We want to extend and grow the Wikimedia movement not
only with new functionalities, but also with new people.
Settling in this new position will take quite a bit of my attention in the
next few weeks, so please forgive me if I may be slow with answering your
questions between now and then. One of the first things we’ll do is to set
up new communication channels. We will continue discussing the project and
planning on Meta [2] for now and also welcome you to the new, dedicated
mailing list [3].
One of our first tasks together will be to find a name for the project. A
first set of proposals have already been made [4], and I invite you all to
come up with more ideas. We will start that off in July or August. Did I
mention that you can join us on Meta [2] to discuss proposals for names,
the project itself, and much more?
Again, thank you all! I am super excited about figuring this thing out with
you, and am looking forward to coming back to Wikimedia full-time.
Stay safe,
Denny
[1]
On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 9:24 AM Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I'm extremely excited about this project!
Not only will this be directly useful on its own (and a fascinating project
in its own right!), but it will help our volunteer editors to ramp up good
base material to work with on the "prose" Wikipedias we already know and
love.
The idea is really to make the structured data we've all been putting into
Wikidata available in a human-readable form at a big scale, that's still
able to be shaped and made into something real and readable by human
editors. By moving around where in the chain the data gets expressed as
human language, we hope to make something that's just as editable but much
more maintainable in the future and across multiple languages.
-- brion
On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 9:04 AM Katherine Maher <kmaher(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
(A translatable version of this announcement can
be found on Meta [1])
Hi all,
It is my honor to introduce Abstract Wikipedia [1], a new project that
has
been unanimously approved by the Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees.
Abstract Wikipedia proposes a new way to generate baseline encyclopedic
content in a multilingual fashion, allowing more contributors and more
readers to share more knowledge in more languages. It is an approach that
aims to make cross-lingual cooperation easier on our projects, increase
the
sustainability of our movement through expanding
access to participation,
improve the user experience for readers of all languages, and innovate in
free knowledge by connecting some of the strengths of our movement to
create something new.
This is our first new project in over seven years. Abstract Wikipedia was
submitted as a project proposal by Denny Vrandečić in May of 2020 [2]
after
years of preparation and research, leading to a
detailed plan and lively
discussions in the Wikimedia communities. We know that the energy and the
creativity of the community often runs up against language barriers, and
information that is available in one language may not make it to other
language Wikipedias. Abstract Wikipedia intends to look and feel like a
Wikipedia, but build on the powerful, language-independent conceptual
models of Wikidata, with the goal of letting volunteers create and
maintain
Wikipedia articles across our polyglot Wikimedia
world.
The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an
article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses
conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, it
should be possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge
to
create models for articles that also have
universal value. Using code,
volunteers will be able to translate these abstract “articles” into their
own languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to
read
about any topic in Wikidata in their own
language.
As you can imagine, this work will require a lot of software development,
and a lot of cooperation among Wikimedians. In order to make this effort
possible, Denny will join the Foundation as a staff member in July and
lead
this initiative. You may know Denny as the
creator of Wikidata, a
long-time
community member, a former staff member at
Wikimedia Deutschland, and a
former Trustee at the Wikimedia Foundation[3]. We are very excited that
Denny will bring his skills and expertise to work on this project
alongside
the Foundation’s product, technology, and
community liaison teams.
It is important to acknowledge that this is an experimental project and
that every Wikipedia community has different needs. This project may
offer
some communities great advantages. Other
communities may engage less.
Every
language Wikipedia community will be free to
choose and moderate whether
or
how they would use content from this project.
We are excited that this new wiki-project has the possibility to advance
knowledge equity through increased access to knowledge. It also invites
us
to consider and engage with critical questions
about how and by whom
knowledge is constructed. We look forward to working in cooperation with
the communities to think through these important questions.
There is much to do as we begin designing a plan for Abstract Wikipedia
in
close collaboration with our communities. I
encourage you to get involved
by going to the project page and joining the new mailing list[4]. We
recognize that Abstract Wikipedia is ambitious, but we also recognize its
potential. We invite you all to join us on a new, unexplored path.
Yours,
Katherine Maher
Executive Director,
Wikimedia Foundation
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract
Wikipedia/June 2020 announcement
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_Wikipedia
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny
[4]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/abstract-wikipedia
--
Katherine Maher (she/her)
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
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