Hi All,
Here is a abridged summary of the 37th Bangalore Wiki Meetup Summary on 11thSeptember 2011 at CIS, Bangalore
*Talk: Technology related issues in Wiki projects and their solutions (By Santhosh Thottingal)*
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This Skype session was presented by the foundation member Santhosh Thottingal. First of all he was formally greeted by the Wikipedians from Bangalore for the new position. Santhosh introduced the Narayam project and its advancements, participation of Malayalam Wikimedian Junaid.V for the development of typing tools for all the Indian Wikimedia projects and Myanmar Wikipedia, fixing several bugs and further improvements.
Then answering a question raised by Naveen Francis about how foundation is going to take initiatives for solving display problems for Iphone/Android based handheld devices he explained how this technological gaps would be narrowed in the coming days though foundation doesn’t have any project soon specifically for this project. FYI the latest Iphone 4 and Android 2.0 supports Indic font rendering while Android 2.2 has rendering issues.
As there are many users who are failing to use Indic Wikipedias because of font and rendering related issues Santhosh shared his experience, past issues and their solutions. He also has shared how the typographer of the Sourashtra language font has come up to release it in PD so that it could be used by all. The current project for web fonts especially for Indic fonts have successfully been tested in www.Translatewiki.nethttp://www.translatewiki.net/which will be soon launched for all the Indic Wikipedias. The web font project has even gone beyond the Indic WPs and is also successful for Hebrew, few
European languages and Myanmar which has rendering issues even in Win 7.
Santhosh also shared his experience related to Text-To-Speech application development for Indian languages which would be a boon for the visually impaired people. There would be a common high volume word and phonetic sound database which would be used to generate downloadable mp3/ogv files so the Wikipedia articles could be converted to audio files. Though the complexity of Indian languages doesn’t make this an easy task there had been lot of advancements in this project which is available for testing at www.silpa.in.
Santhosh explained the thought of outreach programs such as Wiki Maratrhon to bring more developers into the community which would be one of his talks in the Mumbai WCI who will address issues in Indian language Wikipedias.
Then he moved onto question based discussion about OCR (Optical character Reader) and machine translation or TDI, expllained the complexity of the developing tools to for Indic languages.
Then there was a discussion about WikiProjectIndia by Naveen Francis. Naveen explained the hierarchy of the project, campus collaborations like Symbiosis, Pune for Economy subject under this major project. He also focussed how outreach programs driven in both regional as well as in English Wikipedia to bring more editors into the project which would be beneficial for all the Wikipedias. Wikimedians also discussed glimpses of using different tools in Wiki, Assessment, Analysis of web hits for regional Wiki.
Then there was a small discussion for the regional Wikipedias, how more editing sessions would help developing Wikipedias. Subha explained the statistics of Odia Wikipedia followed by a discussion for promoting regional Wikipedia using social sites like Facebook, taking the Wikipedias to school children and the government for creating bigger Wiki projects.
regards * ସୁଭପାSubhaPa ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ _______________________________________________ Wikipedia Odia (Oriya) mailing list wikipedia-or@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-or facebook.com/OdiaWiki Tweet @OdiaWiki .............................. Mailing list for Wikimedians / Wikipedians in & from Bangalore, India wikimedia-in-blr@lists.wikimedia.org *