What is the present status of Tamil OCR?  20 volumes (8376 pages) typing should not solution for this!

Jayanta

On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 1:07 AM, ViswaPrabha (വിശ്വപ്രഭ) <viswaprabha@gmail.com> wrote:

Let me mention of yet another possible model that we are almost about to try in ml:

Apart from the already tried and tremendously successful models of school-wise student model and general community competition (for prizes in kind or just for credential certificates), we are now pondering upon a new idea:

Use secondary social network collaboration.

As an example, if you have formed (or if you could grow from now,) a very vibrant Wikimedia or other language-focused community network in Facebook, you can open up an appropriately scaled competition model  within that. Many people are now seeking independent localization tools and input methods just to use Facebook.

(And BTW, thanks to Facebook, which I always detested, for making a great invisible revolution among mainstream local community members, that most other models are still struggling to achieve!)

In Malayalam, now we have several such large communities each one specializing in their own arenas (eg. Butterflies, Plants, Birds, Grammar, Films and Film Songs etc. etc.). They all share the idea that most of such shared knowledge and digital text and images shall ultimately end up in WM pools.

So, imagine a world where,

A Tamil community in Facebook takes up this project. (May or may not be with an organized competition spirit). Each member picks up a few pages one at a time, and post it back to Facebook. A small team collects this and pipes to Wikisource. Eventually, the volume gets completely in.

Just imagine... and it shall happen!

PS. Why in FB and then why not directly in Wikisourse?

You know why! The interface makes a big difference. Let's admit that!

-Viswam

On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 12:03 AM, Yann Forget <yannfo@gmail.com> wrote:

FYI. Yann

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ravishankar <ravidreams@gmail.com>
Date: 2014-08-30 20:10 GMT+05:30
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] 20 volumes (8376 pages) of Tamil
Encylopedia released under Creative Commons
To: Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Hi,

Tamil Development Board (an autonomous institution under Government of
Tamilnadu) releases its Encyclopedia (10 volumes, 7407 pages) and
Children's Encyclopedia (10 volumes, 969 pages) under Creative Commons
license. Tamil Wikipedians lead by Prof. C. R. Selvakumar and Prof. P.
R. Nakkeeran, (Director, Tamil Virtual Academy) spearheaded this
initiative coinciding with Tamil Wikipedia's 10 years celebrations.

An official confirmation (in Tamil) can be seen at

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Letter_from_Tamil_Development_Board_donating_20_volumes_of_encyclopedia_in_Tamil_under_Creative_Commons_license.jpeg

Scanned copies of these works are already available at

http://tamilvu.org/library/kulandaikal/lku00/html/lku00ind.htm

At Tamil Wikipedia, we are discussing how we can get this content
typed and transferred to WikiSource. Doing so can be a good model to
encourage more such works to be released in public domain.

Following are two options I can think of:

1. Volunteers type all the content. Besides taking years to complete,
this won't do justice for the value of time of volunteers who can do
more valuable work than typing mechanically.

A program like IT@School present in Kerala or a contest can encourage
more people to join this effort but not all communities can't emulate
this model successfully.

2. Request WMF to give a grant to the owner of the content and let
them hand over the typed content to Wikisource volunteers who will
upload and wikify the content.

This will ensure maintaining the spirit of volunteerism and yet
getting the work done in a professional and time bound manner.

Numerous works in Wikisource are such ready made content uploaded
already in the web through other projects like Project Gutenberg.

If providing grants to non-Wikimedia organizations is an issue, a
grant towards this can be given to community / chapter who will then
outsource the typing work.

I welcome community's input on any other model for this as India has
vast amount of literature and works like this are waiting to be
transfered to Wikisource. This is one area where we can add lot of
content to Wiki projects at once.

Ravi

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