Open source effort gives indigenous language an official typeface Sarjom baha, a phonetic input method for typing the Ol chiki alphabet.
Santali, an aboriginal South Asian language, has a brand new freely licensed font and set of cross-platform open source input tools on the way. The typeface family was designed by type designer Pooja Saxena and went through several rounds of review by language experts. However, the typeface is still one step away from reality. Because of this, two input methods will be made available along with the typeface; Sarjom Baha, a phonetic input method so that every common user can easily type the they pronounce the words, and InScript, a keyboard layout standard for Indian scripts. Even though the original plan was to create a editor community to contribute to the Santali Wikipedia and bring it live from Incubator, outputs will just be distributed for the users to use them.
A tools orientation session is being organised on July 10 at Hyderabad during the regular monthly meetup. Telugu Wikimedians who would be interested to learn about advanced editing tools like citation templates and Twinkle are welcome to join.
18 language Wikipedia communities, including English, are expected to take part and 12 of these have coordinators to help their community to participate in the edit-a-thon.
Programme reports Outreach, education programme and community engagement programme reports:
Participants of the Training-the-trainer programme and Mediawiki training at Pune. Image by User:SantoshiWiki, CC BY-SA 4.0.
We have been working with the Department of State Educational Research and Training of Karnataka (DSERT), a Government of Karnataka-run research and training institution headquartered in Bengaluru. With the hope of expanding the reach of Science-related content in Kannada Wikipedia, we organised an edit-a-thon spanning over three days from the 11th January through the 13th.
A two-day long train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training programme was organised during May 28-29 in Pune to better capacity of Wikimedians both technically, and outreach and community building. In this report, learn more about the experience of Santoshi Tiwari, a Wikimedian who travelled from the city of Nashik to participate in this event.
To help Wikimedians learn about essential tools that are used across Wikimedia projects, a tools orientation session was organised on July 10 during the monthly meetup at Hyderabad. We have attempted to capture the experience and inputs of long time Telugu Wikimedians Rajashekhar and Murali Mohan in this report.
Dhanalakshmi, a student from St Agnes College, Mangaluru, who was a participant of TTT 2016 has blogged her experience at Train-the-Trainer 2016 event organized by the Centre for Internet & Society earlier this year.
