Hi,
T. Shrinivasan <https://ta.wikipedia.org/s/5www>, a Tamil Wikipedian, wins
2016 Sundara Ramaswamy award for Tamil Computing for his contributions to
Free Tamil Ebooks and Indian language Wikisource projects.
This is the fourth year in a row that people supporting Tamil Wikimedia
projects are winning this honor. This award includes a cash price of 1000
Canadian dollars and is being presented by the diaspora Tamils organization
called Tamil Literary Garden based in Canada.
He is a passionate advocate and an exemplary contributor to Tamil computing
related FOSS (Free and Open Source) software. He has been promoting Free
Culture movements in Tamil for over ten years. He has developed tools
related to OCR, which enabled transcribing thousands of Tamil books, adding
more than 500,000 pages to Tamil Wikisource and Noolaham Digital Library.
His tools also support the growth of other Indian languages. He is the
former coordinator for the Indian Linux Users Group Chennai and the founder
of non-profit community project FreeTamilEbooks, which publishes DRM-free
ebooks in Tamil under Creative Commons licenses. Till date, it counts more
than 4.7 million ebook downloads.
He started an online magazine run by volunteers for Free Software in Tamil,
Kaniyam. Kaniyam has published several technical Tamil books such as “எளிய
தமிழில் GNU/Linux”, “எளிய இனிய கணினி மொழி – ரூபி” and “எளிய தமிழில் MySQL”.
He has written numerous technical articles in Tamil, covering emerging
programming languages, tools, and technologies. He has trained and mentored
numerous individuals such as Thagaval Uzhavan who in turn contribute back
to community projects.
He is a technical contributor to Noolaham Foundation. His contribution
includes helping to build the multimedia platform, extracting templated
metadata from MediaWiki, and research into next-generation digital
preservation infrastructure.
Shrinivasan serves as the coordinator for INFITT’s India Chapter. He is
currently working as a Systems Architect in a private software services
firm at Chennai. You can follow him on Twitter at @tshrinivasan or contact
him at tshrinivasan(a)gmail.com.
About FreeTamilEbooks
Free Tamil Ebooks is a non-profit initiative providing hundreds of free
ebooks to readers in the Tamil language. This is a unique project in the
South Asian languages. Volunteers compile Creative Commons-licensed
writings by popular bloggers and authors into ebook format. Started in
2013, they have released 280 ebooks till date counting 3.9 million
downloads. Each book gets downloaded at least 500 times, but a few books
have crossed the 1,00,000-download threshold. True to his FOSS ethos, Free
Tamil Ebooks source code is freely availble at:
https://github.com/kishorek/Free-Tamil-Ebooks Learn more from the Interview
in Pressbooks
About OCR tool for Wikisource projects
OCR for Wikisource is a game-changing tool that converts Pdf or Djvu files
to text using Google OCR and uploads the content automatically to
Wikisource. Since December 2015, this tool is under active development with
intense collaboration from various Indian language Wikimedia communities.
By September 2016, the tool has added more than 900,000 pages to Bengali
and Tamil Wikisource projects. Addition of 2000 nationalized books to Tamil
Wikisource is a significant milestone. This also catapulted Tamil in to the
list of Top 10 Wikisources in the word by page count. The same tool is used
by Noolaham project to OCR Tamil works from Sri Lanka and make it
searchable online.
Let us join in wishing him to serve more :)
Ravi