Hi All,

The proposal due date has been extended to 16 Dec 2013, in order to give more time for proposals and also to strengthen the nominations. You can check the current status of nominations and initiate new proposals at this pagehttps://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Komarraju_LakshmanaRao_Wikimedia_Award_Proposals .

Thanks Arjuna

2013/12/3 Ravi Vyzasatya vyzasatya@gmail.com

Dear fellow Wikimedians,

I will start by introducing myself to the community. I am Ravi Vyzasatya based in Maryland. I have contributed to Telugu Wikipedia since 2005 and to a lesser extent in Telugu Wiktionary and Wikisource. I did serve as admin in all these projects. Although my primary interest is in writing well researched articles in the area of South Indian history, I do help the community by running bot scripts and taking care of miscellaneous administrative tasks.

Telugu wikipedia will be 10 years old in another week from now. On this auspicious occasion Telugu Wikimedia Community is organizing celebrations under the leadership of an organizing committee headed by Vishwanath B.K, Pranayraj as Secretary, Kasyap as Treasurer along with Rahimanuddin, WMIN SIG lead Telugu, Vishnuvardhan, CIS-A2K Program Director as members. We have also constituted an awards committee with myself as President, Arjuna Rao Chavala, WMIN Co-founder and its first President as Secretary and A. Rajasekhar, T. Sujatha, NWR 2011 award winners from Telugu Wikis and A. Radhakrishna, Former WMIN SIG lead for Bangalore as members. The award is named after Komarraju Lakshmana Rao[1], pioneer Telugu encyclopedian who undertook the first modern encyclopedic effort in Telugu, perhaps the first among Indian languages (c.1912-13). It is also quite fitting tribute to Lakshmana Rao to honor his memory in the centennial anniversary of such pioneering effort. The award carries a citation and cash prize of Rs 10,000/. Organizing committee and awards committee members are ineligible for the awards to avoid any perceived or real conflict of interest.

We are inviting nominations [2] for awards on Telugu Wikimedia projects. Nominations are due by 9th Dec 2013 24:00 midnight (UTC). Members can self -nominate or be nominated by others, in consideration for these awards. Nomination process has been developed by Arjuna building upon the NWR 2011 nomination process[3] pioneered by another WMIN Cofounder and the then EC Member Arunram . We express our sincere appreciation for the same. We think that this initiative with nominal cash prize by Telugu community may be the first of its kind and will complement the existing recognition mechanisms and help encourage budding Wikimedians in their initial years of contribution. We invite all Indian Wikimedians to participate in the award nomination process as you may be familiar with our Telugu Wikimedians through their efforts in English, Kannada, Tamil language Wikimedia projects. For the benefit of wider Wikimedia community, we have provided for relevant remarks on the nomination pages in English and also invite nominations or support for the existing nominations in English, if you choose to do so.

We solicit your wishes on this happy occasion and will be sharing the updates about the celebrations, awards and other related Telugu wiki activities as things roll out.

Sincerely,

Ravi Vyzasatya

References 1.English wiki page on Komarraju Lakshmana Rao, the first Encylopaedist among Indian languages from India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komarraju_Venkata_Lakshmana_Rao

2. Award details page in Telugu

https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%AA%...

3. Nominations page in Telugu

https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%AA%...