DEV Community: Liudmila(Jade) K

Wikimedia internship: Modifying Expectations

Liudmila(Jade) K — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 22:44:16 +0000

Planning for me usually leads to the one of the two results: it either becomes a good plan for me to follow, with optimized schedule and everything, or this leads to the ultimate disaster, when nothing goes as planned. Of course, you should strike to the something between these two points, but it almost never happens, at least for me.

And, sure, for such a big project, as my Outreachy task, sticking to the plan in each and every aspect is not an option - it's too big, takes a lot of time and, basically, too many things can go wrong. The first thing, that could be considered as the "wrong" one (but not really) is that I'm not the only one intern chosen for this project, there's two of us - and working in a group is always different comparing to working alone.

So at the start of my internship, I decided for myself, that, yes, I have some kind of plan, but really I do not. I decided, that rather when having a plan, I have a trajectory, and I'll stick to it. There's these main milestones, that I should head to - but less strict planning is more handful to accommodate different issues. And this approach showed itself as quite a helpful one - but it doesn't mean that my expectations weren't bended by reality.

The biggest change for me was a realization, that current project and dealing with source code analysis has some of it's features that are quite different from natural texts, for example, amount of words, used in texts, and increased importance of the word order. These facts may look obvious, but understanding that is really important, as it affects your decision on which algorithms and approaches should be used.

Another important thing I didn't realize when I started my internship is that the amount of data I have to work with is really huge. My project is connected to the functions, which are used inside different wikis, and this information is not really on the surface level; regular Wikipedia reader would probably never think of something like that. But, well, there are really a lot of functions, doing different stuff: from displaying correct pronunciation to showing different message boxes.

This fact lead to another unexpected result - computational speed is way more important than precision. The end user will be the one, checking whether the algorithm prediction is correct or not, and the amount of data is about two hundred thousands of code examples - so computational time is our worst enemy. And this is quite unusual, at least for me, as most of the papers prefer accuracy of prediction as a desired metric.

So, my vision of the project changed a lot through these weeks of research and hard work. And I'm quite sure my insight would be different by the end of the internship. But the most important is the fact, that in the end the community will get a tool, that will make everyone's life a bit easier.

Abstract Wikipedia as a step to better future

Liudmila(Jade) K — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:28:27 +0000

Wikimedia Foundation is huge. No, I mean, really huge. So talking about what it does as a whole would require a lot of time - and at the same time, telling that it tries to give everyone “free access to the sum of all human knowledge" would still be true. That's kind of vague description, isn't it?

Yet it gives the right feeling. Wikimedia Foundation really strikes to try to provide knowledge for everyone, and make this knowledge as comprehensive and unbiased as they can. It's not an easy task, and it definitely requires a lot of work from the community too - but there are a lot of projects which are aimed towards this goal. One of them is Abstract Wikipedia.

If you are reading this article, that means that you are quite good at least at one language, English, and that means that finding information on Wikipedia isn't much of a problem for you. That is because English Wiki is huge, containing more than 6.2 million articles.

But that's not the case for everyone. A lot of developing countries still suffer from knowledge gatekeeping. It's hard to learn English, if you are not privileged, and it's almost impossible to access free or relatively cheap knowledge in your native language. And if you suddenly find Wikipedia in your native language - it would be quite small, most likely, due to the fact, that there's probably only handful of people around the Globe who could contribute by creating articles and translating them from other languages. Of course, the autotranslation tool exists - but it lacks an ability to translate to the rarest languages, as there's not enough material to train this tool.

This is where Abstract Wikipedia project comes to the spotlight. The basic underlying idea is that encyclopedic language is quite limited, comparing to normal language, so there exists a finite amount of words and phrases, that would allow to transfer facts and relations between them well enough. So to translate an article to the language, there such article doesn't exist, it's enough to find an article, written using Abstract Wikipedia terms and functions - and translate these terms to the target language.

Of course, it may still sound confusing, so I'll just tell the main idea more directly - it is faster to translate about a thousand words and word combinations than to translate 100 articles directly, one by one. So this project means that even a bunch of wikipedians could fill a Wikipedia on rare language through using Abstract Wikipedia, making knowledge a lot more accessible (which is the goal for the Foundation, as you already know).

It's a legitimate point to ask "and where does the facts come from"? Well, yes, Abstract Wikipedia is more about translating tools to show a relationship between facts - but Wikidata, which exists for 8 years already, is full of facts to fill these gaps.

Abstract Wikipedia project is grand in it's goal. Yet it's out there not only to help in translation, but also to make different functions accessible to everyone. What do I mean by "functions"? Well, right now Wikipedias are already using them a lot. You have someone's birthday date, and you need to automatically update their age. Use a function - Scribunto module, a piece of code, created by someone else and stored in your wiki. You want a page to show a warning, that it's dangerous to edit it, as it would affect a lot of users - use a function, special template, which will do this job for you. They are already here - and there could be more, helping in matrix calculations and strings processing. This is the goal of Wikifunctions, which lies underneath Abstract Wikipedia proposal as a translation tool.

And what is my job, as Wikimedia intern, in this huge project? It's quite simple - at the time of internship Aisha, who's also an intern, and I are the ones, who should fetch all the community functions in all wikis and try to find copies between them. Sometimes the code can be literally copy-pasted, sometimes written from scratch to hold the same functionality. There's no global database now, so when someone wants to use a Scribunto script or a template, еhey must look for it or write it themselves. A global database with these functions would save you time, nerves - and storage space on Wikimedia's servers.

So, while the whole Abstract Wikipedia project is huge, this task is quite small - and yet it's going to make life a bit easier for thousands of people. And even this task is a step forward for the project - an important and helpful one.

Everybody struggles - but documenting makes it better

Liudmila(Jade) K — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 19:13:25 +0000

Everybody might get stuck - this happens, and it should't be a big deal. It's not hard to think about it theoretically, but on practice it's way harder to calm yourself down and not panic.

Some of the other Outreachy interns this round speak about failing their tests and integration with already existing code (you can read their stories, for example, here or here. These are valid problems, which can occur while working in projects with quite a long history - but my biggest struggles this week were of different kind.

Wikimedia community is full of creators, who make tools of different purposes and sizes, and there are various ways to develop something you need. This leads to variety of tools, supported by the community - but also to the point when there are too many guides and pages, which can be lost and unknown by the community. So here is the story.

All the Wikimedia projects have good, well-documented API for various requests. It can provide a whole lot of info on pages, including last update time, which was exactly what I needed. But here comes a twist: I was working not with a simple normal wiki page, but on unique, special one - SiteMatrix.

I've been digging through the API for a few hours, and it made my head hurt. API kept responding me like the page doesn't exist at all. I tried looking at which requests did my browser send to get the page - nothing. I felt desperate. Still trying to get some requests, I hit search button with the request of Wikimedia wikis, the title of that page. And page, called this way, did really exist. It just wasn't special.

I've looked through it, and noticed info about meta database, which store all the information about Wikipedia projects. I looked into it's tables - and it stroke me. The page was special, because it was rendered directly with the information from the database, that's why there was no 'edit' button, no update time - nothing.

So I switched to the database, and it solved multiple things at once: I got both last update time and links to the pages.

And then I updated the page with a piece of my request to the meta database, just to make life a bit easier for someone who would like to look into it after me.

A sighed deeply that day - I've spend about about half of the day with seemingly no result just to find out that to solve everything I had to look at the problem from totally different angle. It happens.

Yet my head suddenly felt a lot lighter, when I finally knew what to do.

Scaredy-cat's guide to Outreachy admission

Liudmila(Jade) K — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:48:54 +0000

I know, this year has been messy for everyone. My 2020 made me feel like a failure a lot: I had to drop out of the Uni right before the graduation because of mental health, and, after recovering, I kept failing my internship interviews. It made me struggle once again - I've always considered myself to be quite a smart one. I started to question myself once again, and the imposter syndrome started hitting me once again. "Maybe IT is not a path for me after all? What should I do with my life now?"

Searching for a job to apply to, I suddenly remembered about Outreachy. While being in high school, I heard about Google Summer of Code and after that I visited from time to time. Reading about it, I found out about Outreachy and registered for it just to read about submitted projects.I've dreamed of participating in such program as it would make me feel connected to the global community. And it's always been a dream to contribute to something huge - maybe a naive one, but still. And yet, I was unable to participate in such an event (or so I thought) because my university made us spent almost the whole June studying.

But now I had no Uni to depend on. So I decided to apply.

Step 1 was to write essays about yourself, the discrimination I faced and the situation in the industry in my country. It was quite uncomfortable experience to sum up everything I had to come through - and yet it made me think about the situation around open source in my community.

It felt very strange to acknowledge that no one had ever talked about helping open source projects, and some teachers I met were even gatekeeping us from contributing by saying that it's only for geniuses. But a lot of projects do need help, and not everything is as hard as it seems, and the community is always there to help you. These thoughts made me speak about open software in my social circles more.

Step 2 was to wait for the initial application results - and keep failing job interviews with HR managers not even answering my emails about things I could improve. I felt that it was kind of unfair but couldn't do anything.

Step 3 was to find out that your initial application was successful and now you have to decide on projects you want to participate in. And it was really, really hard, as there was so many great opportunities - and yet I questioned myself "Am I good enough"?

And then I had to skip 2 weeks because of illness.

So step 4 was to tell myself that doing something at least would bring me experience and I have to try at least. So I picked one of the projects from the "shortlist" of proposals which looked interesting (and Abstract Wikipedia seems to be fascinating project). I finished my microtask connected to it and submitted this solution on the final day of the application period.

And step 5 was to suddenly find out that I've been accepted as an intern! I felt really surprised and even visited the Outreachy's site a few times to check that it wasn't a mistake. And only mentor's emails made me understand that yeah, this is really happening.

So here am I, meeting the community and waiting for the work to start! And now it feels like it would be a pleasant journey, and that were was not so much to be scared at all. And overcoming yourself and making yourself try can be already good enough.