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ogechivivian
ogechivivian

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The Importance of Documentation

Hello Fellow, its yet another blog post as part of the series on my journey as an intern with Wikimedia via the Outreachy Internship Program.

Wikimedia is a non-profit charitable organisation which has been running a lot of projects, some of them being Wikipedia, wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, meta-wiki etc where you can contribute whenever and as much as you want. Wikimedia projects are made by volunteers, just like me and you. yes, I mean you reading this article today. In the next few paragraphs, I will be writing about my contribution to the Lua Scripting (available via Scribunto) project.

Documentation should always be considered a journey rather than a destination, and being kept up to date with any changes is almost as important than the initial creation; out of date records can sometimes be worse than no documentation at all. Hence the need to keep comprehensive documentation can not be over-emphasize. I am currently working on Review and improve Lua documentation on meta and MediaWiki.

Why Lua?

Lua is supported as a scripting language in all Wikimedia Foundation sites (since March 2013), via the Scribunto extension. The Lua project aims to make it possible for MediaWiki end-users to use a proper scripting language that will be more powerful and efficient than ad-hoc ParserFunctions-based logic. Complex templates and ParserFunctions causes a lot of performance (some pages are overloaded with templates and require 40 seconds or more to parse/render) and bottlenecks.

Having well-organised and up-to-date documentation makes integrations/applications easier and support systems running smoothly, and most of all keep our contributors/volunteers happy!.

I am super excited about the opportunity to make this happen.

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