Technical Community Newsletter/2023/April

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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 deadline to apply for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy summer round for this year has passed. Wikimedia received around 60 proposals for 9 projects promoted via both programs. The proposals are currently under review, and the final results will be announced in the first week of May. Proposals on GSoC and Outreachy workboard on Phabricator.
• The deadline to propose a session or workshop for Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 has passed; 28 sessions proposed in Phabricator; voting period continues until April 9th. A schedule will be published soon.
• New educational materials are now available to help you learn and teach others about Pywikibot: Manual:Pywikibot/Workshop Materials. These new materials are based on content that was originally presented as part of the Small Wiki Toolkits initiative. Please read and share these materials, give feedback in Phabricator or on Talk pages, or edit the pages directly if you find errors.

What's new

• Diskdance completed the hard part of a longstanding technical wish by implementing a lexer for wikitext for the Python library that powers Extension:SyntaxHighlight. Deployment to Wikimedia wikis has not happened yet but interested parties can follow T334137 to track next steps.
• Bináris put together the first version of the Pywikibot Cookbook. Aimed at intermediate and advanced Pywikibot users and script developers, the cookbook features code examples and recipes for different bot tasks. You can learn more about this project by following T330855.
• The latest build of the Wikimedia Developer Portal included new translations into Traditional Chinese 中文（繁體). The site now contains localized content for 19 languages.
• TBurmeister (WMF) published a revised and expanded the Trove database user guide, covering how to add and manage databases within a Cloud VPS project.

Conferences and meetups

• The Wikimedia Hackathon will happen on 19–21 May 2023 in Athens, Greece.
• The Wikimania Hackathon will happen on 16–19 August 2023 in Singapore.

Community metrics in Phabricator and Gerrit

• Phabricator: Number of tasks created in Q1/2023: 7683
• Phabricator: Number of tasks closed in Q1/2023: 7227
• Phabricator: Number of different people who created tasks in Q1/2023: 1044
• Phabricator: Number of different people who closed tasks in Q1/2023: 495
• Gerrit: 382 people wrote patches (145 of them being volunteers) in Q1/2023.

Recent blog posts

Read on https://techblog.wikimedia.org/ about:

• From hell to HTML: releasing a Python package to easily work with Wikimedia HTML dumps

Read on https://opensource.com/ about:

• How Wikipedia helps keep the internet open (Part 1)
• 10 ways Wikimedia does developer advocacy (Part 2)

Do you have a project or initiative that you would like to write about for the Wikimedia Tech Blog? Read the editorial guidelines to learn about what would make a good story and how to get published!

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