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Wikimania and GF Summer School debrief.

Last weekend was Wikimania 2021, and it was a blast! There were more than 4000 registrations for the virtual event, making it the largest Wikimania by far. If you missed it, don't worry! Sessions have been recorded and can all be watched online at your leisure.

The work of the team on building Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia was represented at a session where we first had a short presentation and then over an hour of questions and comments with most of the team and associated volunteers. It was brilliant to hear from so many interested people, and there were a lot of insightful questions, comments, and concerns.

I think we got people excited and had good answers for their questions, but that's of course for you to decide. I would encourage everyone who missed it to watch the overview introduction and the longer full session if they have time. We'd be delighted to follow-up on any thoughts you might have.

Beyond our session, there were many brilliant sessions exploring our communities, our priorities, and our futures. Here is a small selection of sessions which I think were particularly relevant to people interested in Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia:

  • Radhika Mamidi led a great session (video) on the use of machine translation to create articles, and particularly their use on the Indic language wikis.
  • Deryck Chan presented (video) about the challenges that different wikis' and language communities' backgrounds may have on what we consider "reliable sources", how this leads to cross-wiki conflict, and how this may need to change.
  • A panel talked about integrating Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects (video) which discusses the use of Wikidata as a central knowledge base within different Wikipedia language projects. This is a path that Abstract Wikipedia will explore even more, which is why these experiences are crucial to what we are building.
  • In a similar vein is the presentation on Domain Specific Content Generation using Human Bot Collaboration (video) by Praveen Garimella and Vasudeva Varma. They were guiding students to work with bots in order to scale up the creation of good content in underrepresented Indic languages. We certainly hope that they will become early adopters of the Abstract Wikipedia framework.
  • Wikidata: What happened? Where are we going? (video) was led by Lydia Pintscher, and particularly relevant to Abstract Wikipedia fans covered the state of Wikidata's lexicographic data and the plans for improving that.
  • There was a great panel on English as a lingua franca of the Wikimedia movement (video) which raised some important points around how we as a movement can better involve and engage with all people regardless of the languages they speak. Ensuring that we make decisions for all languages and wikis is key to making Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia a success.
  • The round-table on Wikimedia's Universal Code of Conduct (video) was a great opportunity to discuss the introduction of the Code of Conduct to the projects. This is directly relevant for Wikifunctions as it will also be covered by the Code.

Right now videos of all sessions are on YouTube; they will be copied to Wikimedia Commons by the organising team in the coming weeks. My thanks again to the organisers of Wikimania 2021, and to all the speakers and participants that made it so great.

The Grammatical Framework Summer School was held from 26th July to 6th August. The Wikimedia community was invited to join the Summer School, and ten Wikimedians took the time and the opportunity to join and learn about Grammatical Framework, Natural Language Generation, and related topics. There were a total of 51 registered students. We are very excited to see this kind of knowledge transfer.

You can catch up with all recorded sessions through the GF Summer School 2021 playlist. If you are either one of the few who participated, and want to repeat something, or if you want to browse the videos and learn about the technologies and topics, feel free to take a look and enjoy the talks. Many hours of material are available.

Thanks to the Grammatical Framework community, the people at CCLAW in Singapore, and Dr Inari Listenmaa for the opportunity for Wikimedians to join and for organizing the summer school.

We have started a documentation page for external outreach coordination and advice. There are notes on the talkpage, and any feedback is appreciated. The list is not exhaustive yet. Please contact us in case we missed you.

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