Abstract Wikipedia team

The Abstract Wikipedia team is part of the Product and Technology department at Wikimedia Foundation. Our purpose is to help the Wikimedia movement in its work to better support, include, and provide access to languages, communities, and cultures across the world. To do this, we are building a platform and systems for creating articles generated through community-run tools from shared structured data that will spread more efficient and collaborative content creation and translation across Wikipedia languages.

Our first goal is to provide the multi-lingual, scalable, reliable platform on which all our other work will depend: Wikifunctions. Wikifunctions will be the core mechanism that lets the Wikimedia communities share a new form of knowledge, functions. These will empower each community to use tools like those previously mostly available to more resourced languages. Through building an inclusive, welcoming, sustainable focus for the movement's technical work, more communities will benefit both for now and in the long term. Wikifunctions is powered by the WikiLambda extension.

Our longer-term goal is Abstract Wikipedia, a project to use Wikifunctions combined with a common flexible, language-independent framework for representing the structured data and abstract concepts that are present in Wikipedia articles, which would enable easier cross-lingual collaboration and reduce the duplication of effort currently required to create and maintain separate language versions of Wikipedia. This will allow for the creation of new types of content, such as machine-generated articles, and enable easier integration with other platforms and tools.

The ultimate objective of the Abstract Wikipedia effort is to make knowledge more accessible and usable for everyone, regardless of their language or background.

Most content about the team's work is covered in the Abstract Wikipedia pages on meta.

FY 2023/24 Themes
Our planned deliverables for the year support the following strategic goals:

Communication Principles
Main page: Abstract Wikipedia team/Communication principles

We are a team, distributed around the world, who mostly interact through online meetings, asynchronous communication channels, working alone or in pairs, reviewing each other’s work, and communicating externally with other teams, communities, and the media.

We share principles to guide our communication, such as avoiding assumptions, building a culture that encourages good behavior, and leading with empathy.

Our team values honesty, transparency, respect, and fairness in our communication, and will work to provide context, avoid making assumptions, and communicate clearly and empathetically while reviewing each other’s ideas, concerns, suggestions, and other work.

We also seek to recognise and respect our colleagues’ communication preferences and acknowledge their differences, such as culture and language.