Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore37

Summary
The Wikipedia Bangalore meetup is a monthly get-together of wikipedians (contributors and users) to meet up, discuss, share experiences, reach out and advocate for Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Bangalore Wiki community is entering 2 years of regular monthly meetups as the first Bangalore meetup was started on August 2009.

As discussed in the Bangalore Meetup 3 in August, Wikipedians in Bangalore (Bangapedians) will meet up every month on the 2nd or 3rd Sunday at 3 PM. The meetups are intended to be structured as follows —Introductions, a few focused talks by Wikipedians to share experience / expertise followed by demos and open discussions on topics of common interest.

Pre-Meeting discussions can be on the talk page please.

Date and Venue
Date: : Sunday, 11-September-2011 3:00 PM IST

Venue: The Centre for Internet and Society No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, 4th Main Domlur 2nd Stage Opposite to Domlur Club Bangalore 560 071 Karnataka

Intended Audience
Anyone interested in Wikipedia (user, contributor or curious about it). Wikipedians from any part of India or the world and anyone who is interested in Wikipedia! Meetup is open to members of all Wikimedia projects and Wikipedians from all languages. All are welcome, and we are especially interested in seeing newcomers to join the experienced Wikipedians/Wikimedians. If you are interested in coming, please add your name below.

Getting there

 * By Road:
 * From MG Road, Brigade Road, Central Business District, Vidhan Soudha — Come straight on Old Airport Road towards Domlur, and take a Left after Steves Gym / Paratha House. Go straight, and continue straight after the Domlur BDA Complex crossroads. Further, go straight, cross bridge over storm water drain, and take Left AFTER The Energy Research Institute [TERI]. You will see Domlur Club on the LEFT. Take a right onto the SECOND lane, opposite the gate of the Club. The CIS building has a white gate and is on the RIGHT-hand side, first gate.
 * From Hosur Road, Electronics City, Koramangala, Sarjapur, Bannerghatta — Take Inner Ring Road/Intermediate Ring Road towards the Domlur-Old Airport flyover. Proceed straight towards Indra Nagar by taking the flyover. Take a Left just AFTER the flyover, before the Pedestrian Foot Over Bridge [FOB]. Proceed forward and take the Third LEFT towards TERI. Take a Right before TERI and proceed as above.
 * From Old Airport, HAL, Marathalli, Varthur — Come on Old Airport-Varthur Road, cross Domlur flyover, take a Right AT the flyover proceed towards IndraNagar and proceed as per above to reach.
 * From Old Madras, Road, Indira Nagar, Ulsoor — Take 140feet Road [Under Metro] to Domlur flyover. Take a Right BEFORE the flyover, at the Pedestrian Foot Over Bridge [FOB]. Proceed forward and take the Third LEFT towards TERI. Take a Right before TERI and proceed as above.


 * By Bus:
 * From Kempegowda Bus Station [Majestic], KR Market, Shivaji Nagar, take a bus towards Old Airport, Domlur and get down at the Water Tank and Proceed as above.
 * From Banashankari, Central Silk Board — Take a bus terminating at Domlur. Get down after the Indira Nagar FOB, and walk towards TERI as mentioned above. Take a bus going toward Indira Nagar. Get off before the flyover, walk towards, the Water tank, and proceed as above.

Agenda

 * Discussions
 * Bangalore Community Engagement with Wikimedia Chapter


 * Updates
 * Networking

Participants
Add your name as " # " if you have an username or else add " # Name"

Attended

 * 1) Subha Pa(Talk2me)
 * 2) Gkjohn (talk)
 * 3) ansuman (talk)
 * 4) Arjuna Rao Chavala
 * 5) naveenpf (talk)
 * 6) Santhosh Thottingal
 * 7) Sampath
 * 8) Suchi Pallai

Signed up

 * 1) Tinu Cherian (Talk)
 * 2) Subha Pa(Talk2me)
 * 3) Gkjohn (talk) 09:21, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * 4) ansuman (talk) 08:46, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * 5) Arjuna Rao Chavala
 * 6) naveenpf (talk) 11:53, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Regrets

 * 1) Sohan Maheshwar (Talk)
 * 2) Rameshng (talk)

Announcements/Event Notices
Please list external links announcing the meet-up here.

Post-meetup summary/Blogs/News
It was attended by 7 Wikipedians. An abridged summary of the 37th Bangalore Wiki Meetup

Talk

 * Technology related issues in Wiki projects and their solutions (By Santhosh Thottingal)

This Skype session was presented by the foundation member Santhosh Thottingal. First of all he was formally greeted by the Wikipedians from Bangalore for the new position. Santhosh introduced the Narayam project and its advancements, participation of Malayalam Wikimedian Junaid.V for the development of typing tools for all the Indian Wikimedia projects and Myanmar Wikipedia, fixing several bugs and further improvements.

Then answering a question raised by Naveen Francis about how foundation is going to take initiatives for solving display problems for Iphone/Android based handheld devices he explained how this technological gaps would be narrowed in the coming days though foundation doesn’t have any project soon specifically for this project. FYI the latest Iphone 4 and Android 2.0 supports Indic font rendering while Android 2.2 has rendering issues.

As there are many users who are failing to use Indic Wikipedias because of font and rendering related issues Santhosh shared his experience, past issues and their solutions. He also has shared how the typographer of the Sourashtra language font has come up to release it in PD so that it could be used by all. The current project for web fonts especially for Indic fonts have successfully been tested in translatewiki.net which will be soon launched for all the Indic Wikipedias. The web font project has even gone beyond the Indic WPs and is also successful for Hebrew, few European languages and Myanmar which has rendering issues even in Win 7.

Santhosh also shared his experience related to Text-To-Speech application development for Indian languages which would be a boon for the visually impaired people. There would be a common high volume word and phonetic sound database which would be used to generate downloadable mp3/ogv files so the Wikipedia articles could be converted to audio files. Though the complexity of Indian languages doesn’t make this an easy task there had been lot of advancements in this project which is available for testing at silpa.in.

Santhosh explained the thought of outreach programs such as Wiki Maratrhon to bring more developers into the community which would be one of his talks in the Mumbai WCI who will address issues in Indian language Wikipedias.

Then he moved onto question based discussion about OCR (Optical character Reader) and machine translation or TDI, expllained the complexity of the developing tools to for Indic languages. Then there was a discussion about WikiProjectIndia by Naveen Francis. Naveen explained the hierarchy of the project, campus collaborations like Symbiosis, Pune for Economy subject under this major project. He also focussed how outreach programs driven in both regional as well as in English Wikipedia to bring more editors into the project which would be beneficial for all the Wikipedias. Wikimedians also discussed glimpses of using different tools in Wiki, Assessment, Analysis of web hits for regional Wiki.

Then there was a small discussion for the regional Wikipedias, how more editing sessions would help developing Wikipedias. Subha explained the statistics of Odia Wikipedia followed by a discussion for promoting regional Wikipedia using social sites like Facebook, taking the Wikipedias to school children and the government for creating bigger Wiki projects.

Twitter

 * Tweet with #WPMBL37 twitter hashtag https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23WPMBL37

Facebook
Please sign up and write your ideas in the facebook event page.

Media coverage
Please list coverage of this event by media here.

Photos
Please upload to commons and add category Commons:Category:Bangalore Meetup September2011