Technical Community Newsletter/2023/October

• Subscribe to the Technical Community Newsletter
• Read past issues and contribute to upcoming issues

Notes on this issue

Welcome to the October 2023 edition of the Wikimedia Technical Community Newsletter, your source for updates, highlights, and insights from the past quarter, as well as a sneak peek into the exciting events on our horizon for the next quarter.

We believe in the power of community, and that includes your voice. Do you have something remarkable to share in the next quarterly newsletter? Perhaps a groundbreaking project, an event announcement, or an achievement you're particularly proud of? Add your suggestion to the talk page. We'd love to hear from you!

Highlights

• Congratulations to the Tech Contributor of the year - User:Zabe!🎉 He was honored with the prestigious award at the Wikimania Conference in Singapore. We are truly fortunate to have you as an integral part of our community. Congratulations once again, on this well-deserved recognition.

• The Wikimania Conference, which took place in Singapore from August 16th to August 19th, 2023, featured an engaging hackathon in which members of the technical community worked on several interesting projects. Here’s a quick look at some of the showcased projects:

1. User Script to enable 3D Models category in Commons main section
2. Wikidata + Maps in PAWS
3. What is Phorge Phorging
4. ToolForge Health Dashboard Tool (ToolWatch)
5. Wikipedia 1.0 toolset new selection tool
6. QID on Navigation Popups
7. Special:Investigate was broken on all wikis?!
8. OATHAuth multiple devices DB work
9. Add edit count and user creation date to Special:Contributions
10. Twitter to Commons
11. SPARQL Challenge
12. Bengali currency numerals to pagelist widget
13. Wikisource text annotator

• If you were unable to attend the event or missed any portion of the sessions, we encourage you to visit the Foundation's YouTube channel for a comprehensive viewing experience.

What's new

• The Wikimedia Tech blog is officially open for your insightful contributions! We've streamlined our editorial guidelines, making it a breeze for everyone to share their tech wisdom. Dive into the details, and don't wait—start submitting your blog posts today!
• Wikimedia Foundation has launched a Mastodon instance. You can follow us at: wikimedia.social/@wikimediafoundation If you have any suggestions and or questions about this instance feel free to share via the Talk Page
• Please plan to test and update your code for IP masking and the new temporary accounts. The team will be updating the technical documentation for temporary accounts. This change may be available on a test wiki as early as December 2023. It will not be deployed to a content wiki until sometime in 2024. The first public deployments are likely to be partial (e.g, at a single wiki, or for A/B testing). Consequently, your code should be able to cope with all three User account types at the same time.
• The Design System Team is preparing to release version 1.0 of Codex. Check out upcoming release schedule and the the draft announcement to learn more.

Technical Community Spotlight

Introducing the very first edition of our Technical Community Spotlight. Brace yourselves as we unveil the awe-inspiring accomplishments of the African Wikimedia Technical Community!

Read all about it here!

Community metrics Q3 2023 (Phabricator and Gerrit)

Phabricator

• Number of tasks created: 6902
• Number of tasks closed: 6339
• Number of different people who created tasks: 973
• Number of different people who closed tasks: 496

Gerrit

• 335 people wrote patches (113 of them being volunteers)

Recent blog posts

Read on diff.wikimedia.org/category/technology about:

• Celebrating the 2023 Wikimedian of the Year Winners
• Wikifunctions is starting up
• Improving image search on Wikimedia Commons
• Exploring paths for the future of free knowledge: New Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin, leveraging rich media social apps, and other experiments

Read on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/ about:

• sentencex: Empowering NLP with Multilingual Sentence Extraction
• From Phabricator to Phorge

Get involved!

Are you interested in learning more or volunteering to improve Wikimedia Technology? Get involved!