*The Hindu :* *"Indian Wikipedians look forward to Hong Kong meet "*
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/indian-wikipedians-look-forward-to-hoโฆ
* It sounds like a motley group โ a septuagenarian from Chennai, a
mother-daughter team from Salem, a computer engineer from Pune and a
medical student from Kozhikode. But the commonality these people share is
that they are among the 11 Indian Wikipedians โ persons who contribute
articles to and/or edit for the online encyclopaedia โ who will be
attending Wikimania, 2013.
Wikimania is an annual conference centred on Wikipedia and similar
projects. It will be held in Hong Kong in August (9 to 11) this year.
The website on the event (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania) says it
โโฆ features presentations on Wikimedia projects, other wikis, open-source
software, free knowledge and free content, and the social and technical
aspects which relate to these topicsโ.
At Wikimania, 300 to 720 people from 50 countries โ including writers,
editors, programmers, photographers and Wikimedia Foundation staff โ meet.
It is โorganised by local volunteer teams, with support from international
volunteers, and the Wikimedia Foundation and other sponsors.โ
Sengai Podhuvan, the 75-year-old Tamil Wikipedian, who earlier edited a
journal on sports in Tamil, told The Hindu he had submitted a paper,
โImprovements to Wiki editing processโ, for Wikimania.
Mr. Podhuvan has added as many as 2,350 articles on Tamil literature and
science to the Tamil Wikipedia. He has placed in a chronological order
2,000 books from the 17th century and before. He has added information on
200 rural games that were played in the last century till 1950 or 1960 from
various States. โMy own experience, my service, my childhood, these are my
source,โ he said.
Mr. Podhuvan said: โMy hands are shivering. I canโt hold a tumbler or make
a cup of tea without help from my wife. But I can type.โ
Netha Hussain, the MBBS student, is a โpilot volunteerโ for Wiki Womenโs
Collaborations, a worldwide women-driven initiative which concentrates on
creating women-relevant content online. Ms. Hussain, who attended the Wiki
Womenโs Camp in Argentina last year, said: โNot more than 22 per cent of
the articles [on Wikipedia] are by women. Articles on womenโs health are
neglected because of fewer number of women editors. We want more women.โ
She has made 10,000 โedits,โ of which 3,500 are for the Malayalam Wikipedia
and 3,500 for the Wikipedia. Though she has written on topics such as the
medical uses of saffron, mostly, she said, โI translate articles from
English, which is easy. But it is tough to find the exact words in
Malayalam. The dictionaries are not updated. So we have to use English,
Tamil or Sanskrit words [in the Malayalam script].โ
Arnav Sonara, the student of computer engineering, is looking forward to
meeting new people โ especially those with whom he has been working online
at Wikimania. He has made 5,000 edits, including 2,000 for the Gujarati
Wikipedia. He keeps adding articles as the Gujarati Wikipedia has โonly
22,500โ entries and needs more content. He keeps a check on vandalism of
articles. โI do speedy deletions. If new articles not conforming to
Wikipedia norms appear, I mark them for deletions. I keep an eye on them.โ
Parvathi, a teacher in the Government Middle School, Kandhampatti, Salem,
said she would like to discuss many subjects, in Tamil, at Wikimania. She
has added 10,500 edits to the Tamil Wikipedia since September 2011. The
additions are to Tamil literature, scientists and โDivya Desamsโ โ the 108
Vaishnava temples. She contributed 30 articles to the first page and 700
photos in a Wiki Tamil Contest for which she got a โContinuous
Participationโ award. Her daughter, who has been editing for the past one
month, will accompany her.
Wikimanias have been held since 2005 in Germany, the United States, Taiwan,
Egypt, Argentina, Poland, Israel and last year in Washington, says the
website. *
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher (The Hindu ) of the above news article owns the copyrights of
the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kailash Nadh <kailash.nadh(a)gmail.com>
Date: Wed, May 22, 2013 at 11:29 AM
Subject: [smc-discuss] Free and open Malayalam dictionary dataset
To: Discussion list of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing <
discuss(a)lists.smc.org.in>
Hello all,
I've just been able publish the semanticised version of Datuk's original
ASCII Malayalam-Malayalam dictionary digitisation work.
=> http://olam.in/open/datuk
"The Datuk Corpus" is a human readable, parse-ready, Unicode dictionary
dataset with over 83,000 Malayalam words and over 106,000 definitions. It's
been in development for over two years. The dataset is an evolution of
Datuk's original work, and has undergone extensive refinement, corrections,
and structuring, amounting to tens of thousands of changes. The Github
repository for the project contains the full text corpus, an SQL dump, and
a couple Python scripts for parsing and conversion.
This is the same dataset that powers Olam's Malayalam-Malayalam dictionary
that went live two days ago. Also, Datuk's original work constitutes a
substantial portion of the Malayalam Wiktionary.
Sample entries from the dataset:
เด เดเดเตเดฐเดพเดเดเดฟ เดธเด. -เด เดเดเต _ 36953
เดจเดพ. เด เดฐเดฏเดจเตเดจเดชเตเดชเดฟเด
เดจเดพ. เดเดเตเดฐเดตเดพเดเดชเตเดชเดฟเด
เดจเดพ. เดฎเดเตเดเดเตเดเดฟ
เดจเดพ. เดเดเตเดเดเดเดถเตเดเดเดฟ
เดช เดชเดฐเตเดพเดเตเดทเด _ _ 57697
เดจเดพ. เดฎเดฑเดตเต
เดจเดพ. เดชเดฐเตเดพเดเตเดทเดเตเดเดพเดจเด
เดจเดพ. เดชเตเดฐเดคเตเดฏเดเตเดทเดฎเดฒเตเดฒเดพเดคเตเดคเดคเต
The dataset is licensed under the
ODbL<http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/>,
inspired by the Open Street Map project.
Hope this is all useful.
Thanks
Kailash
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discuss(a)lists.smc.org.in
http://lists.smc.org.in/listinfo.cgi/discuss-smc.org.in
Manoj.K/เดฎเดจเตเดเต.เดเต
www.manojkmohan.com
"We are born free...No gates or windows can snatch our freedom...Use
GNU/Linux - it keeps you free."
Guys the following is a news paper article appeared in Mathrubhumi Nagaram
about an android app "Mozhi" which is a text to speech converter.
The news has mentioned เดเตเดฐเดจเตเดฅเดถเดพเดฒ in it.
[image: เดเตปเดฒเตเตป เดเดฎเตเดเต 1]
Regards,
Balasankar C