Outreachy Internship Wrap-Up

It’s funny and a bit scary how fast time flies, just yesterday I was excited and nervous about my first meeting as an Outreachy intern and today, I had my last meetings as an Outreachy intern, and I can tell you for free, It has been a journey!

When I started my Outreachy internship, I had a lot of excitement, but also some fears. One of my biggest worries was that I might not be able to keep up with the pace of open-source development, especially since I was joining a project that already had a huge active community. Thankfully, that fear turned out to be unfounded. My mentors and the community were welcoming, patient, and supportive, which made me feel like I belonged from the very beginning. I also feared that I wouldn’t be good enough and that I’d not last till the end of the internship, but here I am, on the final day of the internship. It’s a real world case of ‘the thing you fear the most may end up not happening’, and I am truly happy I made it to the end.

One amazing thing was seeing myself go from being totally clueless about the project to understanding how to put together the things on the project timeline and actually see the project work. When I was asked to go through the Lusophone wishlist, I actually skipped this project, and when my mentor asked Why, I told him I could not do it. But my mentors helped me break down the project, and that was the beginning of me creating Arquibot. There’s something special about writing a feature, testing it, and then seeing its potential as a real tool that helps the Wikimedia community. Knowing that my work will be solving a real need is one of the most rewarding parts of this journey for me.

This internship helped me grow both technically and personally. On the technical side, I learned how to work with the Wikimedia API, automate tasks with Python, and build a bot that interacts with Wikipedia pages and also interacts with the Wayback Machine. I also deepened my skills in Django, testing with unittest , debugging tricky issues, plus writing clean, maintainable code. These are skills I know I’ll carry forward in my career. On the personal side, I’ve learned not to doubt myself too much. Yes, I may not know how to tackle a project immediately I see it, but I now know to break it down and then tackle each functionality bit by bit until I am done.

My mentors played a very big role in this growth. They guided me through challenges, encouraged me to think critically about my code, and showed me how to break down big tasks into smaller, achievable steps. That guidance helped me feel less overwhelmed and more confident in solving problems. While working with them, I learned the importance of clear communication, documenting my work for others and asking precise questions when I needed help. These may sound small, but they’re essential in collaborative open-source work especially in remote circles.

Outreachy helped me feel more confident in making open source contributions by giving me a structured environment where I could actively learn, make mistakes, and improve with guidance. Before the internship, I often felt hesitant to contribute to large open source projects because I thought my work might not meet community standards or that I didn’t fully understand the workflows.

So far, I’ve completed core parts of my project: Developing the archive bot (Arquibot); ensuring it accesses URLs and then replaces the existing URL template with the updated URL template which has the newly archived URL. We’ve tested it on test Wikipedia articles and there’s logging actions for monitoring how each part of the code runs. We also have a ReadME on its Github page to explain how the bot’s functionality can be reproduced locally. The next steps are to get the community’s approval to use the bot live on Portuguese Wikimedia, and if we get that, the bot can be incorporated fully to Portuguese Wikimedia.

Overall, Outreachy has been an incredible experience. It’s not just about the code I wrote, but also about the confidence I gained in contributing to open source and the skills I developed for my future career.