An apt choice and congrats on the choice. Indeed an early inspiration for a lot of my own
involvement with open information and wikipedia. All the more motivation for me to attend
the Wikiconference in spite of very pressing engagements. For those who have already not
seen many of the bird illustrations by User:Shyamal, would be worth your while to check
them out.
Regards,
Prashanth
On 22-Jun-2011, at 2:07 PM, CherianTinu Abraham wrote:
For those who don't know Shyamal , an active
Wikipedian from India, read on :
( Fwding this mail with the permission of AshLin)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ashwin Baindur
Date: 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(a)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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shyamal
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,
http://www.indianbirds.in/pdfs/Opinion%20Taking%20Indian%20ornithology%20in…
...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
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Gallery.php?wikifam=commons.wikimed…
He has theorised about the role of Open Science in India, and commented on influential
papers on Wikipedia in Science.
http://thebutterflydiaries.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/open-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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