Technical Community Newsletter/2022/November

The Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter shares highlights and news from the past quarter and information about events coming up in the next quarter.

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Notes on this issue

The Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter shares highlights and news from the past quarter and information about events coming up in the next quarter.

Got something to highlight in the next quarterly newsletter? Add your suggestion to the talk page.

Highlights

• The Documentation landing page has been completely revised to remove outdated content and provide more direct access to the most frequently-requested Documentation resources.
• Technical writers gathered existing doc review checklists and turned it into a toolkit. They also published a new process and assessment template for auditing a collection of documents.
• Tech writers on the Developer Advocacy team are interested in starting a recurring Documentation Office Hours space (2023) aimed at anyone who wants to ask questions or get help with technical documentation. Please give us feedback about this on our talk page.
  
• Save the date, #wmhack is back! The next Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Athens, Greece, on May 19-21. For more information, check out the Wikimedia Hackathon page. Registration and scholarship applications open in December.

What's new

• Toolforge tool maintainers can now use toolsadmin.wikimedia.org to create gitlab.wikimedia.org git repositories for their tools. Previously created Diffusion Git repositories have been migrated to GitLab as well. Additional details are available on the cloud-announce mailing list.
• Toolhub completed collecting community feedback on a taxonomy for toolinfo records. Work is now underway to implement the new features.
• Self-service tool deletion has finally arrived to Toolforge! Maintainers can mark their tools for deletion using the "Disable tool" button on the tool's detail page on toolsadmin.wikimedia.org. Learn more about how this works behind the scenes in the announcement of the feature.
• Wikimedia has selected six interns to participate in the winter round of Outreachy for 2022 to work on technical projects. Learn more about their projects.

Community metrics

Phabricator and Gerrit

• Phabricator: Number of tasks created in Q3/2022: 7289
• Phabricator: Number of tasks closed in Q3/2022: 6417
• Phabricator: Number of different people who created tasks in Q3/2022: 981
• Phabricator: Number of different people who closed tasks in Q3/2022: 479
• Gerrit: 348 people wrote patches (126 of them being volunteers) in Q3/2022.

Recent blog posts on the Tech Blog

• Introducing Terraform support on Wikimedia Cloud VPS
• HTTP/2 performance revisited
• Web Perf Hero: Valentín Gutierrez

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Get involved!

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