User:NSzafran-WMF/sandbox
Jalajamoni, better known by her username as Meenakshi nandhini (Malayalam) in the Indic Wikimedia community, is a prolific editor and administrator on Malayalam Wikipedia. This month, we are celebrating her exceptional contributions to the Indic communities and the Wikimedia movement.
Meenakshi first noticed Malayalam Wikipedia when she and her daughter were browsing the internet to learn about medicinal plants. Malayalam is spoken by 34 million people in India and millions more in diaspora. Meenakshi found that Malayalam Wikipedia had a wealth of information as well as knowledge gaps. This prompted her to start editing.
Her first edit was on 4th November 2017 and she eventually became a dedicated admin and contributor. Meenakshi is proud to have written 8,762 articles in Malayalam and 25 in English, and has some edits on Wikisource and Wikidata. The first article she worked on, Paramaribo (in original Malayalam), became featured on Malayalam Wikipedia. She read more, edited more, and participated in different contests, like the Wikipedia Asian Month and took on multiple 100 wikidays challenges. Feeling lonely at home, Meenakshi would sometimes be on Wikipedia from morning to evening, at one point writing 25 articles in a day. Two other of her most favourite featured articles on Malayalam Wikipedia are the oscar fish (original Malayalam) and the Arunachalesvara Temple (original Malyalam).
When asked what motivates her to contribute so much, Meenakshi responded Wikipedia is a treasure for the future. Spending an hour on Wikipedia can benefit millions.
Meenakshi sees that among editors in her community, some are quick to tag articles for maintenance and improvement. She invites more to take up the challenge to help write and improve. She proudly shared that her articles are rarely tagged for improvement and if they are, she would fix them immediately. Related challenges in her project are machine-translated articles and one-sentence stubs with few active editors to help fix and improve.
At the moment, there are few active admins in the Malayalam community, and she hopes with greater outreach and more offline activities, as well as online ones, her community can thrive and grow. Historically, contests and campaigns have helped to bring in new editors in her community, but not without challenges either, and retaining editors in general has been difficult. She has also seen how politics and polemics instead of verifiability and neutrality have contributed to a rhetoric of mistrust against Wikipedia amongst some Malayalam speakers. She tries to stay clear of personal narratives and polarized articles. Scientific articles, healthcare, women’s biographies, and articles related to history, botanical plants and paintings are among her favourites.
Like a true Wikimedian with many hats, Meenakshi is a pharmacist by profession and runs a pharmaceutical shop in her hometown near Trivandrum, Kerala, India. Her daughter (Monusha) is also an active Wikimedian in Malayalam nearing the completion of her PhD in biotechnology. Her mother is very proud.
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| “ | Wikipedia is a treasure for the future. Spending an hour on Wikipedia can benefit millions. | ” |
Main project: Malayalam Wikipedia
First started editing: 4th November 2017
