[smc-discuss] Fwd: [Wikimediaindia-l] Santhosh Thottingal joins the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Team

Wed Sep 7 04:39:55 PDT 2011

Congrats and All the best!!!!!!!!!!!!

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Sajjad Anwar <sajjadkm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Awesome news! Congratulations!
>
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:04 PM, Praveen A <pravi.a at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Congratulations!
>>
>> On Sep 7, 2011 2:57 PM, "Anivar Aravind" <anivar.aravind at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Congrats Santhosh for the new endeavor  !!
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: CherianTinu Abraham <tinucherian at gmail.com>
>> Date: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:07 PM
>> Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Santhosh Thottingal joins the Foundation
>> Engineering Team and Gerard Meijssen as technology outreach consultant.
>> To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
>> <wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>>
>>
>> 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 :)
>> 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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>> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>>
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>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Sajjad Anwar | W: http://sajjad.in | T: @geohacker
>
>
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