New subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] 37th Bangalore Wiki Meetup Summary

12 Sep 2011

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.net<http://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
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