Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2020-10-14
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Naming contest: Today we closed the first round of the naming contest.
176 proposals were submitted, and more than 500 votes tallied over these. Two proposals are clearly leading the tally, Wikilambda and Wikifunctions. Four more proposals made it past the first round: Wikimedia Functions, Wikicode, Wikifusion, and Wikicodex. These six proposals will now undergo a first, preliminary check by the legal team of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the ones that pass the review will enter as candidates into the second and final round of the naming contest. The second round will begin October 27 and go for two weeks, until we close the voting on November 10.
I am very excited to see the creativity of the community making so many proposals, and for so many people having joined the voting.
Outreachy: Abstract Wikipedia also submitted a task to the Outreachy program. Outreachy is a program that was started in 2006 by the GNOME Foundation, and has grown in scope and in the number of participating organizations over the years. The goal of the program is to increase the diversity of contributors to free and open source projects by providing internship opportunities. Wikimedia joined the program in 2013 for the first time, and there have been many interns that have been mentored by the Wikimedia Foundation within the Outreachy program.
Current situation: For Abstract Wikipedia we have created a task that aims at analyzing the current code base in the Wikimedia projects. The wiki of functions aims to make a diverse range of functions available to the Wikimedia projects: unit conversions, calculations, formatting, and much more. Currently, the Wikimedia projects already have a mechanism to solve some of these use cases, by using Scribunto modules written in Lua.
The task is to take stock of the current situation. What kind of problems are being solved with the Lua modules? Which of these are available across many of our projects? Which of these are suitable for the approach that we plan for the wiki of functions, i.e. can they be resolved with purely functional solutions without access to context? Do modules have small, but important differences between their implementations in different projects?
We are curious to see the results of this work, and it will directly feed into our roll-out plans to support the Wikimedia projects we plan for next year. It will hopefully help us identify which functions would be most valuable for the projects, and how to allow the projects which are interested in doing so to use them and rely on the new repository of functions.
Development: Our own code base has also been developing. A new view mode is now available that considerably improves the display and readability of ZObjects in the wiki (see screenshots of before and after). The development of the programmatic evaluation of the content based on its types is ongoing, which is the last big part of our work on Phase β.
External publications: Smashing Magazine published Developing for the Semantic Web, which uses Abstract Wikipedia as its vehicle, but goes well beyond the scope of Abstract Wikipedia and discusses the meandering history of Semantic Web technologies and its current incarnations and hopes.
What can you do?
- Join the Abstract Wikipedia mailing list.
- Work on lexicographical data in Wikidata.
- If you are an Outreachy applicant, check out our task (Wikimedia project #1).