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Thank you, fellows!

In April we shared with great happiness that Google.org supported the development of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions with a generous fellowship program. Six fellows joined us in April and May for a period of six months, and as their fellowship has come to an end, it is time to take a look back and appreciate their achievements. It was a pleasure to work with the fellows, and some of us had the lucky opportunity to meet.

Olivia Zhang joined the fellowship as a product manager, and she filled that role for the performance workstream and beyond, organizing and prioritizing the numerous requirements, and outlining a product narrative for performance at Wikifunctions. She also created and managed an overall launch document for Wikifunctions, allowing us to get a better view of our status and the work ahead. The launch document will now be taken over by our product manager Rebecca, who recently joined the team. Olivia helped us understand and answer important questions about Wikifunctions's ultimate scope and how to best achieve it.

Thanks to Mary Yang and her work we could safely launch the Wikifunctions Beta in time for Wikimania. She set up the availability and performance monitoring infrastructure not only for the wiki itself, but also for the supporting services such as the evaluator and orchestrator. Her work is crucial in preparation for the general launch of Wikifunctions. She contributed numerous patches to the performance workstream. This also allowed Mary to dive and understand our architecture deeply, and she provided us with insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our architecture.

Eunice Moon supported the fellowship as a program manager. She supported the fellows in their work, particularly with the implementation of the natural language workstream, involving external members from the community and academia. Together with our community relation specialists and other folks in both organizations, she set up and planned out a series of posts on Diff further outlining the project and its aims. She also was the main organizer behind the in-person Zürich Fellowship offsite which the fellows attended.

With Ori Livneh, we were able to welcome back an old friend. Ori was not only the tech lead for the fellowship program, but also was an invaluable translator between the world, the culture, and the language of Google and Wikimedia, allowing for the other fellows to work smoothly together. Ori was a catalyst for the launch of the Wikifunctions Beta in time for Wikimania. He also led the work on a thorough evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the architecture of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions, which is going to be published soon.

Ariel Gutman brought his many years of experience in natural language generation to the project. Together with community members such as Mahir Morshed, external experts such as Maria Keet, and other Googlers such as Kutz Arrieta, they started the natural language generation workstream. Ariel boldly sketched out a proposal for the natural language generation architecture for Abstract Wikipedia, outlined (together with Maria Keet) a template language to be used, and discussed the progress in a recent Diff post. He also created a Lua-based prototype, in line with this architecture, demonstrating that the proposal is feasible; he will soon present this work in detail.

When we learned that Ali Assaf had written his PhD on lambda calculus, we were very excited. The lambda in the name "WikiLambda" pays homage to the inspiring role of lambda calculus for Wikifunctions. Ali dived right into formalizing the underlying function model, putting the whole project on a stronger conceptual and practical foundation. He discovered and fixed plenty of bugs in the orchestrator where composition evaluation is implemented. Ali’s main result is the semantics of Wikifunctions documentation and further essays on generic function types, local vs. global keys, and the semantics of validation.

To all the fellows: thank you!

Three more fellows remain with the team, and will stay with us until the end of the calendar year, Dani de Waal, Sandy Woodruff, and Edmund Wright.

The Google.org fellowship program is designed to let Google employees work pro bono with nonprofits and civic entities. Fellows build open-source solutions to equip their hosting organizations with better capabilities to reach their goals. As you can see with the contributions of the fellows to Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions, this is an opportunity to benefit from people with unique talents, and to allow them to do pro bono work. We want to thank the fellows for their willingness and interest to work with us, and we hope that they had a great time. We also want to extend our gratitude to Google.org for allowing us to participate in this programme.

Development update for the week of October 21, 2022

[edit]

Experience:

  • Made type expansion unnecessary in the evaluator
  • Fixed more FE bugs
  • Completed proposal for front-end error handling
  • Merged ZObjectDiffer

Meta-data:

  • Drop back-compat. code in PHP and Vue layers (T291136)
  • Developed proposal for readable summaries of all error types (T312611)

Natural Language Generation:

  • Categorized discussion points on Abstract Representation
  • Refined the template language
  • Patch of Ndebele language codes got pushed to Wikidata
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