Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2023-04-28
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Wikimedia Endowment awards $1 Million grant to Abstract Wikipedia
We are happy to highlight the grant of one million U.S. dollars made by the Wikimedia Endowment to support Abstract Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Endowment is an investment fund which uses a part of its gains to fund Wikimedia projects and the free knowledge movement. Launched in 2016 to support the future of Wikimedia projects, the Wikimedia Endowment is a permanent fund that supports Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in times of uncertainty, and enables long-term investments to support their growth and innovation. The endowment is a safety net that helps protect Wikipedia now and into the future. The Endowment was established as an independent organisation in 2022.
This year, for the first time, the Endowment is making some grants. We congratulate the other recipients: Wikidata, the Machine Learning programmatic work at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the offline reading project Kiwix. In total, the endowment made $3.2 million dollars available this year.
We express deep thanks to the Wikimedia Endowment for their support. You can read more about the grant on a post on Diff by Phoebe Ayers, Chair of the Grantmaking and Community Committee of the Wikimedia Endowment Board of Trustees.
The team’s manifesto, OKRs, and communication principles
Currently, the Wikimedia Foundation is going through the process of annual planning for the upcoming financial year (July 2023 to June 2024), receiving and incorporating feedback. We want to give a huge shout out to the folks working on the process and implementing it. You can join the conversation and the collaboration around the plan until Friday 19 May 2023.
Our team is slightly outside of this process, since we already have a development plan that we are following. Adding to this plan we now also published our team’s manifesto, including our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and our communication principles.
The manifesto summarises the why and what of our team and project. It is a good, succinct summary of the work we are doing, and the motivation behind the work. As we say in conclusion:
“The ultimate objective of the Abstract Wikipedia effort is to make knowledge more accessible and usable for everyone, regardless of their language or background.”
The objectives and key results that we have set ourselves define a number of concrete metrics which we hope to achieve with Wikifunctions. They cover the growth of the community, the usage and maintenance of the content on Wikifunctions, and the diversity of contributors and multilinguality of content. It feels very difficult to come up with meaningful numbers here, but we have tried our best. We are sharing those numbers to keep ourselves accountable, and we would be .
Finally, the Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions team is a distributed team, and thus communication plays a heightened role for the success of our team. The communication principles arise from the team’s values, and make explicit the commitments we share for communicating with each other.
Although the communication principles only apply to our team and our interactions with the community, we hope that by modelling our interactions and by listing them publicly, we will also lead the Wikifunctions community to adopt similar principles. We are hoping that the community that will be participating on Wikifunctions will assume good faith, allow for an environment where people can safely raise ideas and concerns, and where we all remember to consider the human behind the user account. We have no claim to novelty on these principles.
Volunteer’s Corner on Monday 8 May
Usually, the Volunteer’s Corner is on the first Monday of the month. Given that this falls on May Day, the International Workers’ Day, we have decided to move it to May 8th, at the usual time, instead. Bring your questions and ideas!
The next Volunteer’s Corner will be on May 8th, 2023, at 17:30 UTC on Jitsi at meet.jit.si/AWVolunteersCorner
Oleg Parashchenko’s presentation on his experience implementing a natural language generation system from earlier this week can be found recorded here.