Technical Community Newsletter/2024/April

Notes on this issue

Welcome to the 2nd edition of this year's 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

Trust and Safety Product team would like to ask volunteer developers who maintain features and tools to adjust their code to temporary accounts. The team wants to minimize the impact of temporary accounts on the technical ecosystem. There may be breaking changes.
Wikifunctions has released its second supported type: natural numbers. In less than a week from its launch, the community has already created more than 100 functions that involve numbers, from basic functions (such as addition) to more complex ones (such as calculating Fibonacci numbers or turning numbers into the corresponding month of the year).
The SRE team ran a Datacenter Switchover exercise, moving all wikis to our datacenter in Virginia for 6 months. This is an important periodic test of our tools and procedures, to ensure the wikis will continue to be available even in the event of major technical issues. The exercise was very successful, requiring less than 3 minutes of read-only time and showing us concrete things to improve in the wikis' infrastructure.
We have passed the halfway mark and are now serving the majority of MediaWiki application traffic using Kubernetes. Transitioning to Kubernetes will help us better utilize our hardware and reduce energy consumption, as well as markedly simplify our tooling and operations. Moving to Kubernetes has revealed a number of interesting problems, so this is a significant milestone.
The deadline to apply for Google Summer of Code and Outreachy summer round for this year has now passed. Wikimedia has received over 95 proposals for the 13 projects promoted through both programs. Currently, mentors and program organizers are diligently reviewing all the proposals, and we anticipate announcing the final results in the first week of May. You can find the proposals listed on the GSoC and Outreachy workboard on Phabricator.
The Outreachy Round 27 internship program has wrapped up, with 7 awesome interns tackling 7 exciting projects! Dive into their internship adventures in this report: From Interns to Innovators: The Impact of Outreachy Round 27 Internship Program
Wikimedia was officially accepted as one of 11 organizations participating in Google Season of Docs! See the proposal to learn about this year's documentation project. The deadline to submit a statement of interest is April 28.
The Toolforge Grid Engine deprecation project has been completed. On 2024-03-14 the Grid Engine infrastructure was turned off completing a final migration project that started in late 2022. The roots of the project reach back to at least August of 2015 when Yuvi Panda posted to the labs-l list about looking for more modern alternatives to the Grid Engine platform. The Toolforge administrators would like to thank everyone who helped make this project a success.

What's new

Call for Nominations: Coolest Tool Awards 2024! 🛠️ The fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award returns with an in-person event for the first time since 2019! The winners will be announced at Wikimania 2024. Please recommend tools until Friday May 10th, 2024. You can nominate as many tools as you want by filling out the survey multiple times. Submitting multiple entries is encouraged! Visit Coolest Tool Award 2024 to nominate a tool and for more information on the award & nomination process.
Tool Docs guide published! The WMF Technical Documentation team has published a new guide to help you create and improve tool documentation. This guide covers the basics of how to document tools, from creating a user guide, to adding a README and commenting your code. It provides links to doc templates and examples of documentation from real Wikimedia tools. Check it out, and consider joining the Doc Your Tool project for the 2024 Hackathon!

Conferences and meetups

Wiki Workshop will be held virtually as a standalone event on June 20, 2024. This edition will have a novel track ‒ Wiki Workshop Hall ‒ to connect Wikimedia researchers and Wikimedia movement members, including Wikimedia developers. The call for proposals is open until April 29, 2024.
The Wikimedia Hackathon will happen on 3rd - 5th May 2024 in Tallinn, Estonia. Visit the MediaWiki page Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 for more information on the event format, projects, social activities and more.
The Wikimania Hackathon will happen on 7th - 10th August 2024 in Katowice, Poland.

Community metrics in Phabricator and Gerrit

Phabricator

Number of tasks created in Q1/2024: 7313
Number of tasks closed in Q1/2024: 7180
Number of different people who created tasks in Q1/2024: 1075
Number of different people who closed tasks in Q1/2024: 520

Gerrit

Gerrit: 374 people wrote patches (149 of them being volunteers) in Q1/2024.

Get involved!

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!

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