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

[maxin john]

 Awesome news... Congrats !!

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:39 PM, sreeja manghat <sreeja.manghat at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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