Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2022-07-12

Abstract Wikipedia Updates

Welcome, Amin! Cory in residency

Welcome, Amin!

As Aiswharya has rotated 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

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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 arthereistanbul 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 gmail.com.

Other and Workstream updates

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We are hiring for a Quality and Test Engineering position! Apply here, and for more information see the last newsletter.

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

Natural Language Generation (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