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From:
Ashwin BaindurDate: Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 5:15 PM
Subject: [WikiConference-India 2011] First speaker lined up!
To: For organising national WikiConferences in India <
wikiconference-india@lists.wikimedia.org>
Short on the heels of our first tentative sponsor is our tentative first speaker. On the talk page of the schedule on Meta:, I had suggested that we could schedule a talk on ''Indian Biodiversity in Wikipedia - Issues, challenges & the way ahead'' by Shyamal.
He has agreed to my proposal.
The Indian biodiversity scene has a number of people who work on Wikipedia but rarely venture out in Outreach and as such remain completely unknown to the general Wikipedia community. Shyamal is such a guy. So I will introduce you to him.
An editor since 26 November 2002, Shyamal has an edit count of over 36,000 edits on English Wikipedia, is an administrator on English Wikipedia and is quite simply India's most prolific contributor on Nature and Wild life.
Respected amongst the ornithological community in India, where he wrote a seminal paper in 2007 on "Whither Indian Ornithology" in a peer-reviewed journal, Indian Birds,
...he has contributed over 5200 images to Commons, many of them carefully retrieved from nineteenth century books and cleaned up and loaded as well as svg images painstakingly crafted
He has theorised about the role of Open Science in India, and commented on influential papers on Wikipedia in Science.
Shyamal has also loaded hundreds of documents into
www.archive.org where they are now available to posterity.
When he reads this, Shyamal will once again accuse me of being a hagiograph. Well, as a fauji, I like to call a spade a spade. Just thought, you'd like to know.
The Indian community has many unsung WikiHeroes, one of whom is Shyamal.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
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