Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2023-05-12

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Abstract Wikipedia Updates

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Welcome Carrie!

We are welcoming Carrie Coxwell to the team! Carrie is joining us as a full stack software engineer, and her first task will be to support the development of the frontend to get us ready for launch. Here is Carrie’s introduction in her own words:

Hi, all!

I'm writing to you from Memphis, Tennessee, where I have been living for the last nine years. I'm a senior software engineer with a focus on front-end technologies. My professional background is an eclectic one: in addition to being a software engineer, I've worked as a parking garage attendant (a bucket list item of mine; go figure), copy editor, classroom teacher, professional musician, and as a (truly terrible) waitress.

My interests are many and varied. I am passionate about animals, language, teaching, open source hardware, canceling plans, music, Japanese and Taiwanese stationery, Bob's Burgers, and rainbows — just to name a few. I dream of high-quality, free, and equitable public K-12 education for all kids.

When I'm not working, these days you can catch me engaged in my current hyperfixations: knitting and trying to reverse engineer NYT's Wordlebot (though not at the same time). I'm thrilled to be joining the Abstract Wikipedia team.

Join me in welcoming Carrie to the team and the Wikimedia movement! We are looking forward to working with her.

History of Wikidata

Last week, Denny presented the "History of Wikidata" at The Web Conference WWW2023 in Austin, Texas. The Web Conference is the leading academic conference on all topics Web. The presentation was part of the History of the Web special track, which was inaugurated last year, and I can recommend the track for its talks and papers.

The paper “Wikidata: The Making Of” has been written with Markus Krötzsch and Lydia Pintscher. It is available as Open Access. It was written on the occasion of celebrating ten years of Wikidata last fall. Abstract Wikipedia is mentioned in the outlook.

A fifteen minute video presentation of the paper (but not a recording of the presentation) is available.

The paper is available as PDF and as HTML

Volunteer’s corner

The Volunteer’s corner this Monday was well attended, but unfortunately pretty botched by technical difficulties with Jitsi. Next time, we hope that the situation will have improved, and we will try Jitsi again. But we will have a Google Meet link handy in case we run into issues. See you in June!