Hello! I am super excited as this is my second blog post as an intern with Outreachy working on the Lua Scripting documentation for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Today I wanted to tell you how I got here. For every milestone, there is always a starting point, it comes with its own challenges and struggles. It’s okay to feel stuck at some point while achieving the set goals and tasks because of everyone struggles, including experts. Hey! I am no exception to this rule. It doesn’t matter what other people think or say, struggling is part of life.
On the 24th of Nov 2020, I received the acceptance mail as an Outreachy intern contributing to improving Lua documentation for Wikimedia and it’s been three weeks since. I will be sharing my experience so far with you, yes you. I was new to technical writing, Lua scripting and contributing to the Open Source community. It was an opportunity to learn something different and get familiar with the community.
Here is a little background to the project, Lua is supported as a scripting language in all Wikimedia Foundation sites (since March 2013), via Scribunto extension. The Lua documentation that exists on meta-wiki and mediawiki.org needs some improvement. I am working on improving the documentation to explain what Lua is, why Lua, and getting started with Lua on media-wiki. My mentors Pavithra and Doug have made my onboarding process so smooth, helping out with a lot of resources and follow-up sessions to get me up to speed with the task.
As a newbie to technical writing, it comes with its own challenges and struggles, trying to simplify and provide explanations and adequate references for my users. I had a couple of challenges these few weeks ranging from getting started with editing on the wiki, an overview of Lua scripting and drafting the content in order not to put too much information than needed on the introductory page. These blockers were shared with my mentors and a follow-up session was set to walk me through the process of overcoming the issues at hand.
Technical writing and Lua scripting is an interesting sphere, these past weeks I have learnt that it’s okay to NOT be okay. Reach out your hand for help. Seek the help you need. GET HONEST and GET TO WORK!
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