🕑 1 hour 8 minutes

It's not quite a holiday episode, but it is an end-of-year wrapup, featuring William Beutler, strategic marketing consultant and author of the blog The Wikipedian, which went on hiatus in 2020 and is now thankfully back. William shares some of the stories that he's working on for his "Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2023" feature (his first year-in-review in three years!), and we reminisce on the past year, in both the Wikimedia universe and the tech world in general.

🕑 55 minutes

Birgit Müller is the Director of Product for MediaWiki and Developer Experiences at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before that, she was Director of Technical Engagement. From 2014 to 2019, she worked at Wikimedia Deutschland.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Birgit's user page on mediawiki.org
• MediaWiki Product Insights
  • Monthly MediaWiki Insights reports
  • November 2023 report - includes statistics about review time improvements

🕑 1 hour 52 minutes

Steve Schneider is a professor of information design at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly). He currently teaches a class, Digital Media and Information in Society, whose coursework is managed via Wikiversity and Wiki Edu, and also involves the use of ChatGPT by both teacher and students.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• "Mid-semester rookie report: Starting a wikiversity project & teaching a class with wikiedu assignments" (WikiConference North America 2023 talk)
• Digital Media and Information in Society course on Wikiversity
  • Wiki Edu assignments for Digital Media and Information in Society
• WikimediaCourse on Wikiversity
• ChatGPT session that led to the Wikimedia course
• ChatGPT session to create a Wikidata SPARQL query
• "TiddlyWiki" Wikipedia article
• SUNY Wikimedia Project
• "Monorail" Wikipedia article (has included a "possibly generated by LLM" warning since July 2023)

🕑 1 hour 5 minutes

Alissa Stern founded the organization BASAbali (later renamed BASAibu) in 2011, and the BASAbali Wiki in 2014. The BASAbali Wiki was originally intended to serve only as a dictionary for the Balinese language, but it has since grown to become a general communication hub for the Balinese community.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• BASAbali Wiki
• BASAsulsel Wiki
• BASAibu
• Indonesian Superhero Luh Ayu
• Balinese-language Wikipedia
• "BASAbali Wiki Recognized by US Consulate" (February 2023 blog post, Bali Discovery)

🕑 1 hour 4 minutes

Ilias Sarantopoulos is a Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been at the WMF since 2022.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Wikimedia Foundation Machine Learning team
• WMF machine learning modernization plan
• WMF machine learning model cards
• "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth" (The New York Times Magazine article, July 2023)
• Meta's No Language Left Behind (NLLB) project
• Model Drift & Decay

🕑 1 hour 23 minutes

Tricia Burmeister is a senior technical writer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and part of the (relatively new) WMF Technical Documentation Team.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team
• Wikitech wiki main page restructuring diff
  • Phabricator ticket that relates to this change
• MediaWiki Product Insights page
• Toolhub
• MintyDocs MediaWiki extension
• Documentation > Toolkit
• Documentation > Patterns > Landing page
• Huggle documentation page
• Wikifunctions site

🕑 21 minutes

Clips from five recent episodes! Danielle Batson thinks about the future of genealogy, Ike Hecht considers the effect of AI on software, Tom Harriman describes the contents of Nuclepedia, Rita Ho praises the Content Translation tool, Allan Lim talks about becoming an amateur archaelogist, and more!

🕑 60 minutes

Jan Ainali is a codebase steward for the Foundation for Public Code. On the side, he's an all-around Wikimedia editor, enthusiast and evangelist, with a special focus on Wikidata. He co-founded the Wikimedia Sverige chapter, co-created the Wikidata-based online resource Govdirectory, and co-hosts the (mostly Swedish-language) podcast WikipediaPodden, and that's not even everything!

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Wikimedia Sverige
• WikipediaPodden
• Wikipedia Weekly live Wikidata editing playlist
• Foundation for Public Code
• Govdirectory
• Semantic Web Wikipedia article (with Tim Berners-Lee quote)
• Wikimedians for Sustainable Development
• OpenRefine
• Foundation for Public Code's Standard for Public Code

🕑 1 hour 16 minutes

Bryan Hilderbrand, MediaWiki consultant of TeGnosis and WikiWorks fame, is back on the podcast to talk about weighty matters like the future of science, the nature of truth, and whether periods need one or two spaces after them. 

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• SMWCon Spring 2023
•  Abstract Wikipedia > Google.org Fellows evaluation answer > Scribunto
• "What is Wikiask?" (WikiConference North America 2022 talk)
• Twitter/X Note ranking algorithm
• "No, California wildfires aren’t caused by space lasers, and experts want people to stop asking about it" (2021 San Francisco Chronicle article)
• Mike Hughes (daredevil) Wikipedia article
• WikiJournal User Group
• Trofim Lysenko Wikipedia article
• "It's on Meta, but discoverable – organizational knowledge in a structured form" (Wikimania 2023 talk)

🕑 1 hour 14 minutes

Allan Lim is the founder of the wiki Beyond Angkor, which maps the locations of temples and other sites from the Khmer Empire, in modern-day Cambodia and surrounding countries.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Beyond Angkor
• Beyond Angkor Facebook group
• Khmer Empire Wikipedia article
• Douglas Latchford Wikipedia article
• "Unveiling the ancient Khmer world: Beyond Angkor mapping out over 13K SEA temples" (June 2023 article in The Phnom Penh Post)