Hi, Wikimedia India community!

We enabled Lua on all Wikimedia sites last week. Lua https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua is a scripting language that enables wiki editors to write faster and more powerful MediaWiki templates, and is reasonably easy to learn. We're pretty excited about this, partly because of the promise of Lua + Wikidata https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/14/what-lua-scripting-means-wikimedia-open-source/. You might have heard about this on the Wikimedia tech blog https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/11/lua-templates-faster-more-flexible-pages/ or the tech ambassadors list http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2013-March/000171.html.

If you have questions about how to convert existing templates to Lua (or how to create new ones), we'll be holding two support sessions on IRC this week. You're probably more interested in the one on Wednesday 20 March http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=02&min=00&sec=0&day=20&month=03&year=2013 (for Oceania, Asia & America). There's also one on Friday http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=18&min=00&sec=0&day=22&month=03&year=2013 (for Europe, Africa & America).

See m:IRC office hours https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours for details. If you can't make it, you can also get help at mw:Talk:Lua scripting https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Lua_scripting.

If you'd like to learn about this kind of event earlier in advance, consider becoming a Tech ambassador https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Ambassadors by subscribing to the mailing list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors.

Thanks, Sumana