Happy New Year greetings,I'm glad to announce the Featured Wikimedian of the Month for January 2018, Mr. Yercaud Elango.Yercaud Elango (User:Yercaud-elango) is a prolific science writer from Tamil Wikimedia community. Born in 1961, Elango graduated in Botany and mastered in Population Studies from Annamalai University. Since 1987, he has been associated with the Tamil Nadu Science Forum. He wrote 85 books, most of which are exclusive to science stream.In November 2014, he got his first exposure to the Commons community, and has been very active ever since. Within three years of his joining, he has uploaded more than 10,800 photographs to Wikimedia Commons. He frequently visits Yercaud Hills, Yellagiri Hills, and Sitheri, to photograph various species of plants, animals, and birds. His uploads include 2,450 plant species, and 7,675 sub classifications of plants. He spends minutes, hours, days, even months and years to identify scientific names, before uploading them to Commons.
One of his significant works include, uploading images of 200 rare and endangered plant species that belong to Yercaud Hills to Commons. Interestingly, of the 1003 Moth images available on Commons, 300 were contributed by Elango. He also has credit of uploading images of some of the rarest species like Shortts shield snake, Yercaud day gecko, Green lizard etc. and modern stone age tools like Dolmens, Cairns, Menhir etc. that are available in and around Yercaud Hills. Elango's uploads to Wikimedia Commons can be seen at the category:Category:Files by User:Yercaud-elango
Elango says that he daily allocates one hour to work on Wikimedia Commons, and he feels that allocating time for Commons is something that we do for the society. In 2014, he published his first eBook, and in the last three years, he has published 21 eBooks, which have been downloaded 3,94,303 times. Apart from his regular work, he is now planning to upload his eBooks to Tamil Wikisource. For his services to the society, the Tamil Nadu Governemnet conferred him various awards and titles, which include Yezhluthu Sirpi, Ariviyal Mamani and Vallamaimigu Yezhluthalar.
Regards,Krishna Chaitanya Velaga
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