Technical Community Newsletter/2020/January

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Notes on this issue
The Technical Community Newsletter provides a snapshot of highlights and metrics from the quarter. If you are interested in contributing information or stories to the newsletter reach out to us on the main talk page.

Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019
Technical Conference 2019 took place November 12–15. The conference focused on developer productivity. Its goal was to help address all of the issues — large and small — that will make all parts of our engineers' lives happier, healthier, and more productive.

Read more about the sessions and outcomes on the event's Phabricator board.

Conferences and events

 * Wikiconference North America took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 8, November 2019 to 11, November 2019. This year's main themes were reliability and credibility. The conference included 3 full days of sessions and presentations.
 * WikiIndaba Conference 2019 took place in Abuja, Nigeria from 8, November 2019 to 10, November 2019. There were several technical tracks, including an introduction to MediaWiki Development.
 * The 36th Chaos Communication Congress (36C3) took place from 27, December to 30, December 2019 in Leipzig, Germany. Wikimedia Deutschland, OKFN, mediale pfade and Verschwörhaus organized the WikipakaWG assembly and hosted numerous sessions about querying Wikidata or Wikipedia's infrastructure. The videos are available for view here.

Cool tools
Some cool tools from this past quarter.


 * Book reader based on Internet Archives Open-Source book reader provides a new level of functionality for scanned books in PDF or DjVu formats. Learn more.

Internships and outreach

 * Google Season of the Docs ended in early December 2019. Thank you and congratulations to Pavithra Eswaramoorthy for participating and successfully completing their Google Season of Docs project. The project greatly improved resources contributors to technical documentation on Wikimedia projects and made it easier for individuals to find the resources they need.
 * Google Code-In 2019 began in December 2019 and runs until the end of January 2020.
 * Call for projects and mentors for Google Summer of Code 2020 and Outreachy Round 20 is ongoing. If you would like to mentor a coding or non-coding (documentation, design, research, outreach, translation, etc.) project, share your ideas in a comment in Phab: T241019.

Technical Talks
Wikimedia Technical Talks provide Technical Community members and opportunity to share what they know. Talks take place monthly. You can view this past quarter's talks on Youtube:


 * How to compare text across multiple languages, Diego Saez-Trumper, Research Scientist
 * ResourceLoader tips and tricks, Roan Kattouw, Principle Software Engineer
 * Wikidata, behind the curtain, Amir Sarabadani, Software Engineer
 * Structured data on commons, Cormac Parle, Software Engineer

Wikimedia Technical Talks will return in February 2020. You can find the schedule and learn how to participate on the Wikimedia Technical Talks page.

Community Metrics

 * 7383 tasks created by 960 people and 6571 tasks closed by 464 people in Wikimedia Phabricator in this quarter.
 * 349 people (172 of them volunteers) contributed 14770 code changesets (3077 of them by volunteers) in Wikimedia Gerrit.

Phabricator statistics by month

 * December 2019
 * November 2019
 * October 2019

wikimedia.biterg.io
Have you ever wanted to know:


 * the number of Gerrit patches written by volunteer authors in a year?
 * who are the most active patch authors in a Gerrit repository?
 * who are the latest new patch contributors across Gerrit?
 * who are the most active reviewers per Gerrit repository?
 * how long it takes on average until Gerrit patches get their first review?

You can explore community metrics from the wikimedia.biterg.io dashboards.

Technical Improvements

 * Python 3.7 available in Toolforge Kubernetes
 * Cloud VPS Openstack cluster upgraded to Newton version
 * WikimediaDebug V2 is here!

Wikimedia

 * EMWCon Spring 2020 (April 01–03, Sandusky, Ohio, USA): "Enterprise MediaWiki", i.e. the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies, non-profits, governments, and other organizations. The intended audience of EMWCon Spring 2020 is anyone who uses or would like to learn more about MediaWiki within organizations.
 * Wikimedia Hackathon 2020 (May 09–11, Tirana, Albania): Registration is now open.

Free and Open Source

 * FOSDEM (February 01–02, Brussels, Belgium): FOSDEM is a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software.

Get involved!

 * Mentor tasks in GCI until January 21, 2020
 * Want to learn more about Wikimedia technology or share information with your community? Participate in Wikimedia Technical Talks.