Hi, I’m Kay Wong.

I’m an Outreachy’21 intern from Malaysia under the Wikimedia project, where I’ll be working on creating Machine Learning datasets to measure content reliability on Wikipedia. For my first blog post, I wanted to introduce myself and share a bit about my core values, and how that led to me applying for the Outreachy internships program.

How I got into Machine Learning

One of my core values is curiosity– I’ve always been curious about how things work, and about learning new things. I fell into coding almost accidentally. I was 14, and mucking around on the internet, when I pulled up my browser’s developer console by accident. Fascinated by the code I saw on my screen, I went down a rabbit hole of attempting to research and decipher it. I started with teaching myself front-end web development, and transitioned into Machine Learning in 2016 when I stumbled upon the seminal Stanford Machine Learning course on Coursera.

I fell in love with Machine Learning and Data Science, which combined my love for programming with analytics. Exploring and analysing data was like deep diving into understanding how something worked for me. I continued to develop my interest in the field through a self-taught curriculum by auditing open courses and tutorials available online.

I furthered my interest in the field during my Bachelors of Computer Science, where I completed my Honours research in the field of Natural Language Processing. This provided me with a background in NLP, specifically in Neural Machine Translation which I completed my thesis in. While studying for my degree, I also had the chance to gain some industry experience in the field of Machine Learning through my part time work at Accenture Australia, where I worked as a Machine Learning engineer for a core ML model training and serving platform.

How I got into Civic Technology (and Open Source)

I’ve always been passionate about Machine Learning and Civic Technology. This interest was first developed when I interned at Sinar Project, a Malaysian Civic Tech NGO, in 2017, which was aimed at making crucial information about the Malaysian Government and Parliament more open, transparent and accountable. During that internship, I worked on exploring techniques using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in working with unstructured government data.

It was there that I began to grasp the degree of impact that citizens could have on the political and social matters that affected them. Having previously viewed politics as unaffectable of change, I was of the misconception that one would need to be involved in legislation or politics itself to be able to influence change at a larger scale. The realisation that change could be influenced with code – something I was innately more comfortable with – was empowering. This formed much of the foundation for my interest in getting into open source, which I believe at its core shares much of the same values of social computing and technology for the greater good.

Why I applied for Outreachy (and Wikimedia)

I was excited when I found out about the Outreachy program, which aims to support diversity (especially for underrepresented communities) in open source and free software. I’ve always been curious about open source, but was never really sure where to start. I found the idea of contributing towards FOSS projects on Github intimidating. The idea of meddling with a larger codebase and having to bear the judgment of impersonal reviewers formed something of a personal (and perhaps illogical) barrier for me.

It’s why the Outreachy program, with the opportunity of more personal guidance from experienced mentors in OSS appealed to me. What pushed me to finally apply was finding out about the available projects offered during Round 21, particularly Wikimedia’s projects. I’ve always aligned with Wikimedia’s values of free knowledge, open source and transparency, and believe that the democratisation of data to the general public in an understandable manner is necessary to facilitate informed decision making. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on what I believe is an essential project, and am so excited about discussing, learning, and exploring more about the project, and FOSS in more detail.

Why you should apply for Outreachy

I had my own personal hesitancies about getting into Open Source, and know that it can be daunting to make that first push (or pull (request)). The Outreachy program served to set aside some of those anxieties for me– just the application period itself, which required that applicants make contributions to project repositories, served to provide the momentum for me to put my anxiety behind me and make some contributions. I strongly encourage future applicants to just apply for the program, and most importantly, CONTRIBUTE (!!!) as even the contributions period is beneficial in itself for getting familiarised with open source.

I’m grateful to Outreachy for the opportunity, and can’t wait to share more upcoming blog posts about my journey into open source through Outreachy and Wikimedia.