Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2022-12-02

Monthly public NLG meetings

This year we have started regular meetings about natural language generation (NLG) on Wikifunctions. This will be a crucial functionality that Wikifunctions will need to provide for Abstract Wikipedia, using community-managed code on top of the platform. The meetings have consisted of a mix of Wikimedia staffers, Google.org fellows, Wikimedia volunteers, academics, and practitioners from the field.

These meetings have been very interesting and very lively, and a number of different approaches have been discussed and brought together.

As the year ends, a number of individual situations of the NLG workstream members change, and we want to use that chance to make one of our meetings public each month, in order to talk with even more people, and to provide a potential path for interested contributors to join the group.

Every third Tuesday of the month, at 16:30 UTC, the NLG workstream meetings will be public. Details on what conference technology we'll use and how to join will be shared ahead of the first event, which will be on 17 January 2023.

Volunteers' corner

Talking about the volunteers, the next volunteer’s corner is coming up this Monday, 5 December 2022, 18:30 UTC. Bring your questions, your ideas, or even just your curiosity, and we will find and help with places you can contribute.

On-going open discussion about Wikifunctions policies

The discussion about the Code of Conduct for Wikifunctions and other policies is open, but has not seen much engagement yet. Your contribution would be very welcome.

Wikifunctions is now updating also on Mastodon

You can follow us and engage with on Mastodon @wikifunctions@wikis.world

Development updates

Right now, our focus remains on the "Phase Theta" functionality, making sure that the whole of the interface is usable, useful, scalable, and stable. There are a few Abstract Wiki tasks tagged "Good first task", and if you'd like to take one on we'd love to chat about them or others in the team's bridged IRC (irc://irc.libera.chat/wikipedia-abstract-tech) / Telegram channel. You can also ask about them in the Volunteers’ corner.

Experience & Performance

Fixed more FE and BE bugs
Implemented changes informed by decisions made on about mandatory/optional fields in the UI (T321695)
[Design] Finished designs of string, reference, type change and monolingual string
Implemented task to invert or avoid Expanding Function Calls before Returning from Orchestrator to avoid shipping huge expanded calls to the user (T297742)

Meta-data

Finished: Drop back-compatible code in function-schemata (part of T291136)
Major ticket closed: Migrate orchestrator/evaluator responses to reply with result envelopes including meta-data map type (T291136)
Bug fix in Orchestrator’s metadata map testing code

Natural Language Generation

Ariel has shared Scribunto prototype video with community