Glad to see this plan proceeding. Congrats, all. Danese
On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:10 AM, Alolita Sharma <asha...@wikimedia.org>wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l