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<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">Dear Wikimedia India,</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">As you probably aware the Govt. of India, immediately post Independence started multiple Indian language encyclopedia projects to stream in Science and Technology. The Tamil language encyclopedia was completed [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Encyclopedia] </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">I'm pleased to report Tamil Virtual University has scanned in the Tamil Kalaikalanjiam / Tamil Encyclopedia [Please see Reference 1 below].</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">I was able to download the material via the wonderful wget command and the 'convert' (from imagemagick lib) in GNU/Linux. However each of the 10 volumes is close to 700 MB without compression.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">I would imagine, the people behind this mammoth task (pre-internet era) would have liked it to be merged into a Wiki type format, which would make it a truly living document </span></font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma">in-sync</font><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"> with the times.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; "><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">I do not have any experience with 1) Tamil OCR software and 2) Automated updates to Wikipedia. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"> </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">Can anyone take the lead on this project ? It will help boost the number of quality, articles in Indian languages. The Children's encyclopedia is being scanned and has a lot of great visual content.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">I have uploaded a sample (10 MB) PDF file at https://sites.google.com/site/periasamythooran/kalaikalanjiam/kalaikalanjiamWikiMergeAttempt.pdf if you are interested to give it a spin.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">Thanks,</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">Murali.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Tahoma" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">1. http://www.tamilvu.org/library/libindex.htm and click on Kalaikalanjiam / Tamil Encyclopedia.</span></font></div> </body>
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