Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2022-06-30
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Last year, we welcomed Aishwarya Vardhana to the team. This week is her last week on the Abstract Wikipedia project, as the Design group at the Wikimedia Foundation is rotating some of their designers between teams.
During her work on Wikifunctions, Aishwarya has brought novel perspectives and points of view to the project, which will shape Wikifunctions for years to come. Her design work, which was frequently featured in this newsletter, and her guidance in diligently testing crucial components of Wikifunctions, will lead to an immensely improved product. Her voice and her work towards anchoring the values of Wikifunctions in diversity, equity, and inclusion will have a lasting impact on the whole project. It is a pleasure working with Aishwarya, and the whole team is sad to see her go. Fortunately, Aishwarya is staying with the Wikimedia Foundation and will take over as designer on the Trust and Safety Tools team; we'll introduce our new design colleague in a future newsletter.
Aishwarya just recently summarized many of the UX research results in a newsletter of its own.
We are very thankful for her contributions, and we congratulate her on her new role. Here are some words from Aishwarya.
Namaste Abstract Wikipedia community! This project is near and dear to me and will always hold a special place in my heart. Thanks to all of you for your commitment to this important, decolonial effort. A question that I wrestled with throughout my time designing Wikifunctions has been, who is Wikifunctions for? Will it truly be a diverse and equitable community? Will it be an ecosystem based in mutuality and trust? Might this audience be different from all the other Wikimedia projects by embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion from day one? The answers to these questions must come from all of us. Each one of us that engages with the project, who writes feedback or an implementation, asks questions, or approves testers, is a steward for these values. As I depart the team and transition into a volunteer, I have faith in us as a collective. See you on the internet!
You can follow Aishwarya’s writing on Medium or on thewildword.com.
We are hiring!
The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring for a Staff Software Engineer as a Quality and Test Engineer! Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia are complex systems, and we need help in order to improve the reliability and the development velocity of our system. We are looking for someone to develop and set up an environment that will allow our engineers to write tests, from effective unit tests to integration tests to end to end tests; to ensure that our tests are run during continuous integration; and to allow for high-quality rollouts of new features to Wikifunctions.
If you are interested, please apply, or if you know someone with the relevant experience and interest, please let them know.
Workstream updates (as of June 17)
Performance:
- Shared the Performance Metrics document with SRE for approval
- Aligned on scope for Metadata and Performance workstreams
- Progressed migration of the tester pipeline from orchestrator into MediaWiki
NLG:
- Work in progress: finalizing the set of deliverables and goals for this workstream
- Prepared for Wikidata Quality Days presentation
Meta-data:
- Altered function-orchestrator and MediaWiki PHP API to respond with a map object
Experience:
- Aishwarya presented the Wikifunctions workflow at the Product Department monthly meeting
- Cleanup tasks for function-schemata and WikiLambda
- Finished table component implementation
- Completed basic implementation of tester and implementation tables
- Handed off designs for typed list view