New subject: Welcoming our Internationalization/Localization Features Engineering team

7 Sep 2011


      Hi Everyone,
Please join me in welcoming our newly formed
Internationalization/Localization (I18n/L10n) features engineering
team. The I18n/L10n team will focus on design and development of open
source tools to improve screen font rendering on web browsers using
open web fonts, input method tools including keymaps and
transliteration software to support Non-Roman languages specifically
starting with Indic languages this year.
The members on this team are Siebrand Mazeland as product manager,
Niklas Laxström and Santhosh Thottingal as software engineers, and
Gerard Meijssen as technology outreach consultant.
Siebrand Mazeland got pulled into Free and Open Source software
translating the FreeBSD Handbook in 2004. After translating a few
hundred pages, and making a few edits on Wikipedia (to the FreeBSD
article of course), he rediscovered Wikipedia in 2006. As an
administrator for the Dutch Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, he was
introduced to "translating MediaWiki" on an obscure wiki (“Betawiki”)
run by Niklas Laxström. Siebrand finds it hard to believe that he is
still going strong on language support in open source projects after 5
years. With translatewiki.net now providing almost 20 opens source
projects with excellent translations and a community of 3,000
translators, he is thrilled to join the Wikimedia Foundation
engineering team as I18n Product Manger, along with his long-time
friends from translatewiki - Niklas and Gerard.
Niklas Laxström is a software and language engineer, with a M.A. in
Language Technology (pending thesis review). He has been a free
software contributor since about 2003, mostly focused on translation.
Niklas joined Wikimedia in 2004 and soon became an administrator of
Finnish Wikipedia and a MediaWiki translator. To aid his translation
work, he created a wiki which has grown to become translatewiki.net,
which now manages translation of dozens of free software projects in
hundreds of languages. Niklas is the author of the Translate extension
for MediaWiki. He is also president of Wikimedia Finland. Niklas has
studied a number of languages including Russian and a little Tamil. In
his spare time, he likes to go for long bicycle rides (taking the
opportunity to improve OpenStreetMap) and to watch sci-fi films
including his favorite Stargate SG-1 series.
Santhosh Thottingal is a free software developer from Kerala, India.
He has been in the aerospace and automotive related IT industry for
the last 6 years. He has contributed to many free and open source
(FOSS) projects. His projects have been around language computing,
especially in his mother tongue Malayalam . He has contributed code,
bug reports and translations to FOSS projects like GNOME, KDE,
Openoffice/LibreOffice, Firefox, TeX, GLibc, Python, Aspell, Hunspell,
m17n, scim to help improve Indic language support. He is an upstream
developer for many packages in popular Linux Distros and is lead
developer for Dhvani, an Indic language TTS, SILPA, an Indic language
computing framework and a Pango-Cairo based PDF rendering library. He
is project administrator of the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing FOSS
developer community. His contributions to Wikimedia projects include
Malayalam Wikipedia and Wikisource offline versions. He is currently a
member of Wikimedia Language Committee. Santhosh is also constantly
improving the readability of Wikimedia projects, especially in
non-Roman languages with the Webfonts Mediawiki extension. He has also
been improving the Input Tool Mediawiki extension. As a team member of
the I18n team, he hopes to develop features that all wikis can use to
display and render all languages. Santhosh comes from a farmers'
family and is passionate about farming. Also as a fan of Malayalam
literature, he has helped the Malayalam Wikisource community digitize
and archive many precious works from Malayalam literature. He blogs at
www.thottingal.in/blog.
And last but not least, in the Wiki world Gerard Meijssen is known as
GerardM. He claims to be the one who has bored people to tears about
languages and language technology via his blog and presentations. Now
he has accepted the challenge to convince people about how
improvements by the I18n/L10n team will make using MediaWiki and
editing Wikimedia projects easy and fun. Gerard will be blogging
officially on the WMF blog as well as on his personal blog about
interesting and relevant topics. He sees his role in this team as the
storyteller who will narrate the team’s progress as stories and help
transform tools developed into new opportunities. Gerard has been
involved in language standards, lexicography and terminology. He is
particularly proud of demonstrating how a multilingual dictionary
approach helps people find pictures on Wikimedia Commons. He has
worked on projects to install and update software, medical terminology
with OmegaWiki which is still an ultimate Wiktionary. He has also
translated text and software on translatewiki.net. He predicts that
“languages in non-Roman scripts will do substantially better on the
Internet as we get the word out how easy it is becoming to read and
write. And the team’s projects will be in the forefront of this and
may astound us all.”
I’m proud to welcome this team of very passionate and accomplished
people who have been bold in their many contributions to open source
software. I hope that this team continues to change the landscape of
free and open source language computing tools and help make every
Wikipedia truly open and accessible to all people in all languages.
Feel free to say hello to Santhosh, Niklas, Siebrand and Gerard online
or next time you see them in person :-)
-- 
Alolita Sharma
Director, Features Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation