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rather than a destination, and being kept up to date with any changes is almost as important than the initial creation; out of date records can sometimes be worse than no documentation at all.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.