Greetings Wikimedia family,
I am delighted to share Wiki Rescues Manuscripts, a call-to-action and project to support the digitization of manuscripts on Wikimedia platforms (Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource). The project consists of two complementary pilots. The first pilot digitizes manuscripts in Indonesia through a collaboration with PPIM, Wikimedia Indonesia, and other partners. The second pilot tests the viability of Transkribus (an AI-powered text and handwriting recognition tool) for languages that are not yet supported by OCR (optical character recognition). We are starting with the Balinese language because the community has already produced the number of transcriptions that we need to create a model in Transkribus.

I invite you to sign-up as a Learning Partner in the final section of the Meta-Wiki page if your community, affiliate, or organization is interested in digitizing manuscripts. We would love to not only support you but also learn from you.I am happy to share that two Wikisource Technical Fellows (Kolawole Lawal & Parthiv Menon) will be contributing to the Wiki Rescues Manuscripts project until June 2023. They will focus on meeting the technical needs of Indonesian Wikisource communities and potentially integrating Transrkibus into Wikimedia OCR. Here is a brief introduction from each of them:Hi everyone, I am Kolawole. I’m from Nigeria. I am glad to be a part of the Wikimedia movement. I love solving software-related problems and listening to good music. I look forward to collaborating and contributing to Wikisource as a Technical Fellow.Hello! I am Parthiv, a final year undergraduate student from India. I love to read and draw, enjoy meeting new people, exploring new places, playing sports, and (unpopular opinion) generally not a big fan of cities. I am fluent with English, Hindi, Gujarati and Malayalam, and can understand a couple of other South Indian languages as well. More importantly, I am looking forward to my time here for it surely does seem like it's going to be fun :)Finally, I would like to invite you all to join us for the next Wikisource Triage meeting on 26th October 2022 at 2 PM UTC (7:30 PM IST) where we will be discussing the pilots and introducing Kolawale and Parthiv. Feel free to edit the agenda directly to add further topics for the meeting. Kindly drop me an email on sgill@wikimedia.org if you would like to be added to the calendar invitation for the meeting.

Looking forward to meeting some of you next week. Have a great weekend!

Regards

Satdeep

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Rescues_Manuscripts

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Rescues_Manuscripts#Wiki_Rescues_Manuscripts_pilot_in_Indonesia

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Rescues_Manuscripts#Transkribus_pilot

[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Rescues_Manuscripts#Learning_partners_sign-up

[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource_Triage_meetings#October_2022_meeting

Satdeep Gill (pronouns - he, him)

Senior Program Officer

Culture and Heritage

Wikimedia Foundation