Bonjour,
In Gitea wikipedia article there only is one reference to a news article discussing Gitea back in 2017. It would be useful to get more but I was not able to find any, surprisingly (or maybe I’m not very skilled at searching the web 
). Not only would it consolidate the notability of Gitea in wikipedia, it would also help convince organizations when applying for a grant.
Do you remember reading an English news article about Gitea?
Cheers
Sadly I also ran into this problem when applying for “verified” status for the project’s official twitter account. I know there are articles about Codeberg from prominent German news outlet when it was originally founded (although those were in german, Neue Entwickler-Plattform TeaHub will GitHub beerben | heise online note codeberg was originally called teahub).
I know it’s not exactly what you are asking for, but here are examples of Gitea being used in large scale
Codberg has > 10k users and is based on Gitea
Openstack uses gitea https://opendev.org/
FSFE uses gitea: https://git.fsfe.org/
OSGeo (org behind postgis) uses gitea: OSGeo Git Services: Gitea - Git with a cup of tea
git.teknik.io is another large instance
Here are some others: gitea/awesome-gitea: A curated list of awesome projects related to Gitea - awesome-gitea - Gitea: Git with a cup of tea
Thanks for the links 
I collected a few others that are not news articles but speak to the notability of Gitea (packages, wikipedia and wikidata, tutorials, native support from hosting providers, etc.).
FWIW you can use non-English articles as sources, I did that for the French name of the telephone game on the Chinese whispers article
Here is the short summary of my findings to demonstrate how popular gitea is. It is probably not worth mentioning news articles because there are very few.