[Wikimediaindia-l] Santhosh Thottingal joins the Foundation Engineering Team and Gerard Meijssen as technology outreach consultant.

Wed Sep 7 08:53:52 UTC 2011

On 7 September 2011 14:07, CherianTinu Abraham <tinucherian at gmail.com>wrote:

> Santhosh Thottingal joins the Foundation Engineering Team and Gerard
> Meijssen as technology outreach consultant.
> Gerard Meijssen , if I may call as an indophile, is very dear for many of
> us and others who reads india mailing list :)
>

Congrats to Santhosh and Gerard.

-
Pravin Satpute

>
> Special congratulations and best wishes to both of them.
>
> Regards
> Tinu Cherian
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Alolita Sharma <asharma at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:40 PM
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Welcoming our Internationalization/Localization
> Features Engineering team
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
>
> 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
>
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