New subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Featured Wikimedian [December 2017]

1 Dec 2017

Greetings everyone,

I take pleasure to announce Hrishikes Sen as the Featured Wikimedian for
December 2017.

Hrishikes Sen
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Hrishikes> is one of
the most active contributors from the Bengali community. Though he started
editing English and Bengali Wikipedia in 2007, he had to take a long break
due to professional constraints. Later he started working on Bengali
Wikisource from 2012, and ever since, he has been an active contributor,
and expanded to English Wikisource as well. With more than 45,000 global
edits, he is an admin on English Wikisource.

As a child, Hrishikes always found reading books as a fascinating task. He
says that he finds reference books as interesting as mystery novels. That
interest, over years motivated him to contribute to Wikisource. The journey
and motivation behind his contributions to Wikisource can be read from a
post on WMF's blog, *Why I contribute to Wikisource?*
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/07/25/why-i-wikisource/>. He says that
till date he's been only active online, but he plans to do outreach in the
coming future. He hopes that attending the 10th Anniversary Celebratory
Workshop of Bengali Wikisource in Kolkata on 10 December may be a harbinger
to his future offline activities.

Hrishikes believes that Wikisource will one day emerge as of the top
digital libraries in the world, and says that as a store-house for primary
and secondary source materials for Wikipedia, the importance of Wikisource
is steadily becoming invaluable. Much of his time, Hrishikes spends working
around Indian works, with a special focus on the works of Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay, Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Rabindranath Tagore. Apart from
being a proofreader, he uploaded more than *750 books spreading over five
languages*
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_uploaded_by_User_Hrishikes>
to
Wikimedia Commons.

Hrishikes hails from Kolkata, but is presently based in Lucknow. By
profession, he is a doctor serving in paramilitary forces. To his Bengali
friends, he welcomes them to contribute to Bengali Wikisource which has
more than 676,000 that have completed Optical Character Recognition and are
waiting to be proofread.

Regards,

Krishna Chaitanya Velaga