Technical Community Newsletter/2020/October

A quarterly round-up of news from the Wikimedia Technical Community.

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Features

 * It's been a busy year for the Small Wiki Toolkits initiative! Learn more about the activities, lessons learned and next steps: One year of Small Wiki Toolkits initiative and more to come.
 * As part of the Small Wiki Toolkits initiative, several Indic technical workshops took place. Find out more: Designing technical workshops for the Indic community and Small Wiki Toolkit Indic workshop series 2020 report.

What's new?

 * You can now use and promote a Starter kit in your wiki community and start translating the landing page and its subpages in a language you want. It lists resources, tools, and recommendations in technical areas relevant to smaller wikis that are just getting started. See the complete announcement.
 * WikiContrib 2.0, developed as part of the Outreachy Round 20, was released (see announcement). It is an easy-to-use developer metrics tool for visualizing the technical contributions to Wikimedia projects on Phabricator, Gerrit, and Github. Try it out and request any new features or report bugs.
 * The second edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations! What is your favorite Wikimedia-related tool, and what makes it so awesome? Nominate the coolest tools until October 14. The top tools will be showcased in an online event.
 * Wikimedia is promoting eight projects via Outreachy Round 21, out of which 5 projects are focused on data science and engineering: https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/wikimedia/.
 * MediaWiki 1.35 was released last month.
 * A new stable release of Pywikibot will be available soon.
 * Work has restarted on the Toolhub project which was last active in 2018. Toolhub is an effort to catalog the various software tools used in the Wikimedia movement. The project is publishing weekly progress reports on meta.
 * A consultation to move Wikimedia code review from Gerrit to GitLab took place. GitLab would be hosted on Wikimedia servers.

Phabricator and Gerrit

 * Phabricator: Number of tasks created in Q3/2020: 7430
 * Phabricator: Number of tasks closed in Q3/2020: 6602
 * Phabricator: Number of different people who created tasks in Q3/2020: 987
 * Phabricator: Number of different people who closed tasks in Q3/2020: 452
 * Gerrit: 332 people wrote patches (148 of them being volunteers) in Q3/2020.

Wikimedia

 * October and November 2020 (Online): Wikidata's eighth birthday. Wikidata went live on 29 October 2012. A global Wikidata birthday party is planned, in late-October and early-November 2020, a global Wikidata birthday party is planned.

Get involved!
Are you interested in contributing to Wikimedia's Open Source technical projects? Find out more!