Released 300 Ebooks at FreeTamilEbooks.com

Happy to release our 300th Ebook in Tamil Language at FreeTamilEbooks.com

For new readers, this is a portal to release DRM free Tamil Ebooks with Creative Commons license.

Read more about the project here – http://freetamilebooks.com/about-us/

It is around 4 years journey with the ebooks. Yes. We are completing 4 years next month. All these years gave great happy moments.

Tons of thanks for all writers, contributors and readers. With all your support only, we are going forward to provide even better services for Tamil Language.

Nothing is happier than to see the dreams come true. Thanks for seeing a big dream together and making it real.

 

Minutes – Intro to Wikipedia – Villupuram

Last Sunday, I gave a talk on Wikipedia at Villupuram GLUG. We had around 30 participants. Got few School Teachers, Writers, Media people too.

Started the session with a game. Started a story with one line. Asked everyone to continue one line after another. Thus the story was built collaboratively.

This experience helped them to understand how wiki pages are being written. Explored about wikipedia history, Foundation, Languages, /various wiki projects like wikisource, wiktionary etc.

Explained about issues by copyright, Creative commons license and Commons.

Then, Poet Ramamurthy expressed his thoughts about wikipedia and public contributions.

Journalist Ko.senguttuvan shared his thoughts on copyrights. He requested all to document their knowledge so that the next generation can use it. He presented me a book he wrote about his Journalism experiences.

Teacher Dhilip narrated his efforts on enhancing the government schools with various ICT activities.

Then, we started the practical sessions. Asked all to create an account on wiki. Then, explored about the pages, history, talk page, visual editor, language tools. Asked them to edit the page for villupuram and asked to add few points.

This was a very initial intro session. Hope they get some idea about wiki ecosystem.

Thanks for the organizers, Puduvai GLUG and Villupuram GLUG. They are doing great activities there by introducing Free Software every sunday.

Special thanks to Karkee, Khaleel and Sathish for great efforts on this event.

Few Photos are here – https://goo.gl/photos/JwXmZwYN1QCvnDfH8

Thanks for Dinamani Newspaper for writing about the event.

Intro to wikipedia – a talk at Villupuram

Tomorrow, Sunday, 18-06-1983, I am giving a talk at Villupuram on “Introduction to Wikipedia”.

Inviting you all to the event. Thanks for Villupuram GNU Linux Users Group and Puduvai GNU Linux Users Group for organizing this event.

Date : 18-06-2017 Sunday

Time : 10.00 am

Venu : Bodhi IAS Academy,
Shanthi Nilayam
No:10, Vishvalingam Layout,
Villupuram – 605602

Contact : 995 253 408 Three , 750 227 341 Eight

 

StreetComplete – Android app to add Missing Street Names in OpenStreetMaps

I am thinking of bringing OpenStreetMaps.org in Tamil. Imagining a world, where a GPS device or smartphone, showing paths in Tamil and giving instructions in Tamil to the driver.

To achieve this, we need all the street names to be filled in OpenStreetMaps.org

I checked for the streets in my area, Tambaram, Chennai. Found that there are many street names are missing. Editing the street names on the browser seems difficult for the lazy me.

Was looking for any alternate ways to add streets in OSM. Found the Open Source android app “StreetComplete“.

It simply shows the streets that dont have a name and ask to enter a name for it. Thats all.

From the description of the app.

 

Help to improve the OpenStreetMap with StreetComplete!

This app finds incomplete and extendable data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as markers. Each of those is solvable by answering a simple question to complete the info on site.

The info you enter is then directly added to the OpenStreetMap in your name, without the need to use another editor.

As it says, it is really simple to add details like street names, road types, shops opening hours etc.

Install this app in your android phone and help OpenStreetMaps to have all the street names. It will lead to various super projects like “Maps in our language” and more.

Help to to build truely open maps.

Few links to explore:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost.streetcomplete

Source : https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete/

Project Idea – Telegram bot to translate strings for Open Source Projects

In wikimedia hackathon, I saw a demo of using telegram bot to translate strings from translatewiki.net

here are the notes about it.

============

Telegram Translation Bot: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131664 DONE

Translate on translatewiki.net without leaving your Telegram app

Code: https://github.com/amire80/mediawiki-telegram-bot/

mediawiki.org page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Amire80/chat_bot_draft

Phabricator: amire80 * Wikipedia: Amire80 * Twitter: @aharoni

Amir E. Aharoni and Taras Bunyk presenting

Justin Du (MtDu), Taras Bunyk, and help from Brian Wolff, Madhvuvishy, bd808, Niklas Laxström, Jon Robson, and more people!

“Most people don’t speak English”

Translatewiki.net – thousands of messages to translate

can now translate through this simple mobile app instead of needing to load the full site in a browser

selects untranslated strings, in your preferred languages, sends them to you, and you translate, and it submits them to translatewiki

Long messages are automatically skipped to fit a use on mobile.

============

Thinking as we can build a bot to translate the strings for mozilla and openstreetmaps.

Need to get your inputs/thoughts/ideas for this.

These links may help to build a telegram bot for translations.

https://github.com/zanata/zanata-python-client

https://translate.zanata.org

https://translate.zanata.org/iteration/view/TamilMap/1/settings?dswid=1182

use this command to get the po file in /tmp/ta.po

zanata po pull –url https://translate.zanata.org/ –project-id TamilMap –project-version 1 –transdir /tmp

We can process the po file using polib

http://polib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

There are many python libraries to create a telegram bot.

http://telepot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://khashtamov.com/en/how-to-create-a-telegram-bot-using-python/

https://blog.pythonanywhere.com/148/

https://www.codementor.io/garethdwyer/building-a-telegram-bot-using-python-part-1-goi5fncay
With all these tools to create a bot, to process Po files and zanata to host the translations, we can connect them all.
If any one is interested in programming for this, reply here.

Thanks.

Image sources:

http://www.asktrustdee.com/2016/03/my-top-5-telegram-bot.html
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Translate_en-ta.png | CC-By-SA

Project Idea – Teach Tamil to Apertium – Open Source Machine translation tool

 

Apertium is a Open source Machine Translation system. It supports many languages like english, hindi, urudu etc.

Explore its features and train Tamil for it.

The following links will help to explore further.

https://www.apertium.org

http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium_New_Language_Pair_HOWTO

http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages

https://sourceforge.net/p/apertium/mailman/message/23318108/

 

If you are interested in exploring this, comment here. Let us work together and make some move with apertium for Tamil.

How Wikimedia movement should be in 2030?

Today, we had a discussion on strategy for wikimedia movement for 2030, with few Tamil wikipedians, media, government, academic friends.

Wikimedia Foundation is planning on what are the things we should focus on wiki ecosystem, to make it even better for the people in 2030.

 

 

I added the following thoughts.

1. Space for adding tiny data.

In future, there will be a drastic change on computers and input devices. There will be voice inputs. Computers will be embedded in all devices. They will be communicating to each other. They will be enabled with augemented reality, virtual reality, artificial intellience to get and express various data. There should be a common data source to get any data from. Wikimedia movement should be that common data source, for all devices.

There should be options to give input as tiny bits. Knowledge should be shared by anyone, in any form. It should not be only in text form or as article. sound input and tiny bits of inputs should be allowed in wiki. Those content should be automatically translated into many languages.

For example, I should ask a device like “Hey, what is the movie shown in nearby theatres to me? ” The device should get that data from wiki. I should ask “What is the price of a TV in chennai and in Austria? ” It should get the details from wiki and reply me in voice in my language. Wiki should allow these kind of data.

2. Decentralised Wikis

Git like decentralised wiki editing will enable, more content coming from the poor internet countries.

The following are the inputs from other friends.

1. Archiving old books like google’s one million books project

2. Archiving old photos, pamphlets, advertisements, magazines

3. Connect with many organizations, governments to get their archives released in CC license

4. Connect with mobile/camera manufactures to add CC license details within the device

5. Connect with social media sites like Facebook to add options to release media files in CC license

6. Finding false news within the flood of information will be a huge problem in the coming days. Is it possible for wikipedia to verify and authenticate the news that are being shared on social media?

7. wiki should be help to build education materials for school/college students, so that all the world get free resources for studies.

8. Data should be added in a unique way, so that it is transformed to multi formats, multi languages automatically.

Hope these will be discussed by the foundation team and taken forward further.

 

After the meeting, met photographers dillibabu and sudharsan. They agreed to give their 1000s of high quality photographs taken around India. I will upload them to commons. Will share the details once started.

Thanks for Wikimedia Foundation for starting these kind of discussions. We need to plan for the future and make it happens. Visit the website and http://2030.wikimedia.org/ and share your thoughts on building a better future for wikimedia projects.

Learning on how to set plans for FreeTamilEbooks.com and kaniyam.com projects. Let us dream a lot and make them true.

 

Few more photos are here – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tshrinivasan/albums/72157684407240936

The things I liked at Mediawiki Hackathon 2017, Vienna

The Mediawiki Hackathon 2017 was organized at Vienna, on May 19,20,21 2017 very well. I liked many things in the entire event. Listing them here.

1. Awesome Event Organizing Team

Wikimedia Austria has 3 full time employees. They provided their full support all the times, from the event announcement. The announcement pages are full with all the required information. Annemarie Buchmann helped me to get done with all the visa processing on time. For every email I sent, got reply within a hour. It was so awesome to get helping hands from far away, so quickly.

2. Venue/Stay/Food at same place

JUFA Wien City was the venue for the event. It is a big Hotel with conference room, mini halls, Rooms for stay, bar, restaurant, play area, kids area, park and 24 hrs free snacks room.

As we stayed in same place, there is no delay in reaching the hackathon rooms. Just wake up, cleanup, jump into the event, till midnight. Then, reachout to room and sleep.

3. WiFI everywhere

The JUFA team provided good WiFI for the event and rooms. Never felt any disconnection.

4. Free travel Tickets

Anne, sent me few travel tickets to roam in and around the city for 5 days. From airport to return to airport, all the travel was covered by the tickets provided. With that we roamed around the city, in trams, in underground trains etc.

5. City Tour

The event team arranged for two city tours. They took people to a grad church and palace. Vienna is a historic city, full heritage monuments.

6. Party

On the Second day, we were invited for a party, at nearby pub/bar. Danced with the hackers. The rain, made us to dance till  early morning 2 am.

7. Free Snacks/Tea/Coffee

The food provided was good. But to make all of us awake anytime and keep energized, there were free snacks/fruits/tea/coffee.

8. Regular updates from the organizing team

We received emails in regular intervals for preparing the event, calling for volunteering for blogging,photographing etc. Those emails made us to be excited about the event a month ahead.

9. Telegram/IRC chat

We had an IRC channel and telegram channel for quick chat. we can ask anything, search for anyone, ask for chargers, connectors, projectors, etc. All the requests were solved by entire team.

10. Mentor program

Experienced programmers willing to mentor, volunteered as mentors for newbies. They trained,shared their skills and helped to build applications. They met daily twice and discussed on how they can improve their assistance to others.

11. Dedicated Photography/Videography

There were dedicated photographers/videographers to cover the entire event. They are wikipedia volunteers who are contributing to commons. They happily volunteered for this. Wondered to know that wikimedia austria lended them high quality cameras and lenses.

12. Media Coverage

Local Press/Media people interviewed about the event and published online and other channels.

13. Short intro talks

On the sessions like inauguration, valedictory, there are only very short intro talks. These short talks save a lot of time and gave us plenty of time to hack.

14. Multiple Connectors for Projector on stage

We had connectors like VGA/HDMI/Apple for various laptops on every projector.

15. Lot of power sockets

We could roam anywhere in the venue and we found power sockets to plugin our devices. There was no shortage of sockets.

16. Freebies/Cards/Chocolates

We got a little watercan and other freebies on the registration desk.

17. Volunteer to take notes on etherpad on all meetings

On all meetings, trainings, we found one volunteers is taking notes on etherpad. It helped the speaker and listeners to concentrate on the talk, without worrying about jotting something on a notepad.

18. Privacy on Photographs

To give respect to the privacy on photographing people, they provided a Orange color tag. No one should take photo of people who are wearing the Orange Tags. For others, it is a blue tag.

Following people are behind this awesome people.

Program

• 

  Rachel Farrand
  Wikimedia Foundation staff

• 

  Srishti Sethi
  Wikimedia Foundation staff

Event management

• 

  Claudia Garád
  Wikimedia Österreich staff

• 

  Annemarie Buchmann
  Wikimedia Österreich staff

• 

  Raimund Liebert
  Wikimedia Österreich staff

• 

  Sonja Fischbauer
  Outreach coordinator

Scholarship committee

• 

  Jean-Frédéric Berthelot

• 

  Siebrand Mazeland

• 

  Tobias Schönberg

• 

  Birgit Müller
  Wikimedia Deutschland staff

• 

  Rachel Farrand
  Wikimedia Foundation staff

• 

  Srishti Sethi
  Wikimedia Foundation staff

Photos Courtesy: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2017/Participants#Team

I thank you all for all arrangements and smooth orchestration of the event.

I suggest all the above features to be in all the events, we conduct. Even very small actions, add more value to the events.

Thanks for the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Austria and all participants, mentors and volunteers.

Notes : Mediawiki Hackathon 2017 – Day 3

 

Today is the the last day of the mediawiki hackthon.

An email from Pablo woke me up. He said that he added a docker container with all the software I asked for like python2.7, wikitools, poster etc. Was waiting for this setup, to build a connector for Lingua-Libre, a web based audio recording tool and to commons, wiktionary.

Rushed to him, to set them all. He is a  super cool guy with so much of patience. He answered me for all my small questions. Wow. Now, its my game to write a connector. Python is an awesome language, which has libraries for most of the stuff we need. wikitools is a simple python library to interact with any mediawiki server. We can automate all the stuff that we do manually with mediawiki.

Learned the difference between wav,ogg and oga formats. Commons supports only oga, ogv files. Not plain old ogg files.

Connector is ready. Now, the audio files are uploaded to commons and relevant wiktionary page is updated to show the audio file. Pushed all my changes to Pablo’s repo.

Here is the sourcecode – https://github.com/wiese/Lingua-Libre/tree/python-backend

Its time for the showcase time. We got 46 presentations. Each one got 3 min to demonstrate what they did on the hackathon. Myself and Hugo were preparing for the demo.

Here is the big list of all the hacks showcased with the links for the sourcecode. There were many demos, which made the crowd to shout “Wow. Cooool. Awesome”. etc.

Its our showtime. Hugo introduced our team and the project. I connected the laptop to the projector. Errrr. It is not showing my laptop. Switched the cables from HDMI to VGA and reverted. No luck. “Press it again, strongly” someone suggested. Now, it showed my screen. I started to speak. “Hello everyone. This is the demo on Connector for Lingua-Libre and wikipedia.”

“Time UP…..”. The timekeeper announced. And we had to stop there. The shortest demo I did is this. 🙂

Fine. There were so many wonderful projects created by awesome people, here.

Listing here a few, which I like.

• Telegram bot to translate strings from http://translatewiki.net
• Games on wikipedia commons
• Improvements on Android app for commons to show nearby places which need photos.
• Sentiment Analysis of Talk Pages as a Service
• An on-wiki map editor to build rich interactive maps for Kartographer
• Real-time collaborative editing in VisualEditor like etherpad, inside wiki
• Wikireaper – Reporting notable deaths
• Visual diffs of edits just made in the visual editor
• Massmail – Tool for sending multiple wikimails at once

The telegram bot idea, gave me lot of new ideas. We can create a telegram bot to translate the strings for OpenStreetMaps in Tamil or any other language easily. People can do the translations on the go, using the mobiles. No need of fancy translation systems.

Another bot can be written to show a word, record its sound, upload to commons and connect to wiktionary. We can even use it to create crowd sourced audio books by recording paragraphs.

Will explore on them and come up with new bots soon.

Wikidata is a hot-cake nowadays. Lot of magic is happening around wikidata. Explored about SPARQL, Quarry, Quickstatements etc.

Our team planned for the further activities to do.

• Add english translation to master branch
• Improve the connector to use it with any wiktionary, any wiki user.
• Install it on a server, so that public can start using it.

Will continue work on these, once I am back to chennai.

That all. The end of the hacking celebrations in Vienna.

Its time for a City Tour with friends. Roamed around the city. Vienna, is a heritage rich city with many good monuments. Went to a big church, crossed nice parks, parliment building, mayer office etc. Found a good restaurant and had dinner.

Had fun discussions on Indian people nodding head for everything, English accent on various languages, songs/music/dance on various countries, Vienna history,  Food culture in Europe/India, The issues Internet Explorer gives to the designers, Study options in Austria and more.

At 11.00 pm we returned to the event venue. Still there are so many monks, staring the laptops, hacking somethings for the benefit of human kind. Long live monks. This world owe you a lot.

Will be spending tomorrow, exploring the Vienna city tomorrow.

Are you interested in what we did for the hackathon? Do you feel sad for my laptop not connected with projector on time? I know, there are few of you are eagerly waiting for it. Here is a youtube video on our works, this weekend.

 

Thanks for all the team of Wikimedia Austria, for the wonderful event. It will be memorable event for me to work with the people, from various countries, speaking various languages. We all are passionate about contributing to wikipedia, making the world even better, by one line of edit/code per time.

World is so small. Hoping to meet you all sometime, sooner.

Image credits: commons

Todays Photos : – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tshrinivasan/albums/72157684007351996

Notes : Mediawiki Hackathon 2017 – Day 2

Just now returned from a party by the event organizers, at a nearby pub Arena. It is so much refreshing, to dance after a long time.

Today, was filled with so much of hacking the project I am working on. Learned a lot of new jargons in Docker arena. Finally, I could install the LinguaLibre software in my laptop with the help of dockerisation by Pablo.

LinguaLibre is a web application, which can help you to record audio files with the web browser itself. I am thinking on adding a backend job for this software, to send all the audio files to commons and add them in relevant wiktionary pages.

1.
I tested all the docker fixes by pablo for new installations, so that any one with docker can install the software easily. I am working on integrating python backend scripts. stuck somewhere in the deep hole. Hope pablo will help to create new docker containers for the python scripts.

2.
I helped Dafna, who is next to pablo, on installing Lingualibre on her laptop. She speaks arabic language. She wanted to give support for arabic writing. i.e right to left to this software. She started to hack the Javascript files and to play with PHP files immediately. Pablo is a great mentor. He explained all the internals of symphony, doctorine, git etc to her. She is almost done with her fixes. Good to see the things are happening so fast.

3.
LibraLingue is in French. I translated all the french strings to English, with the help of google translator. Hmmm. Now, I feel better to use the software. Finally, I know what I am clicking on the screen.

4.
Was discussing with praveen, to have some time on fixing the iOS app, for commons. Few years ago, it was there on the iTunes store. But now, it is not available. He agreed to explore on this. If you are an iOS developer, and can help to work on this app, comment to this post. Will connect the interested people. The source code is on GitHub .

5.
Met Tim on the steps. He worked with OpenStreetMaps. Asked him for the tools available to add street names to OSM with any mobile. Most of the mobile apps for OSM, give the facility to add Point of Interest(POI) like shops, buildings. But, India, what we need and miss mostly are the street names. He asked to explore vespucci. we can get it from Googles play store and from amazon and from f-droid.

6.
Attended a session on Future of LDAP Extensions, by Robert Vogel. We discussed about dropping this and moving the Pluggable SSO extension, as it gives more features. Brainstromed on the requirements and ideas to implement. I asked to give a web interface to test the server and authentication details, and to show the error messages on the screen. You can read the notes here.

 

7.
Attend a session on ORES. It is an XRay engine to the wikipedia contents. It has all the interesting buzz words like machine learning, artificial intelligence, building models, training dataset etc. Aaron Halfaker explored on how to use it in English wikipedia, how the training and scoring works. Asked him if this can be used to score and filter the contents apart from wikipedia like wordpress/facebook comments. He will look on this.

Someone asked as what will happen if I train the ORES wrongly and use it to score all my bad edits to good. He replied as to remove all yours training data and train again with some good person.

Remembered this XKCD in machine learning.

 

8.
Checked with the design team, if it is possible to add a floating tool bar to the wikisource text area, so that we can easily add the formatting strings and symbols. They agreed for this. Tried to do as a simple hack. But it needs more efforts. So added an issue on phabricator to work later.

9.
Petr Bena demonstrated his tool Huggle.  One of the great part with this hackathon, I found is to meet and discuss with the people, who created the software we use in our daily life. ORES, Huggle and lot of software were demonstrated by their original creators. Huggle is a desktop application to do gatekeeping the wikipedia articles easily. We can see the recent changes, allow them or delete them quickly.

Asked him to provide support for Tamil wikipedia. He raised a ticket for this immediately. Dear Tamil Wikipedia patrons, Here is a great tool for you. Let us explore it.

10.
Met a photographer, Manfred werner. He lives in Vienna, doing photography as hobby. He helps to shoot all the events of Wikimedia Austria. The chapters lends him good cameras with big lenses. He is so passionate on commons. He explained me the guideliens he follows on uploading to commons, the photography workflow he follows, about copyright issues on various countries.

11.
There was a group photo session. A paronamic view is available here.

12.
There was a DJ party for us, in a nearby pub. We reached there around 10. It was excited to see the hardcore hackers are dancing like regular dancers here. Enjoyed dancing with the geeks. These english songs are for mild, easy dancing. I asked the DJ guy, if he can play any Tamil Rap song for a high energy dancing. Downloaded the song, “Night Varia” from Pudupettai. That is one of the song for which I dance like a monster, with all my heart and bones. Thought of introducing this song to Vienna. Unfortunately, the DJ system does not support input from mobile. Have to check with my audio engineering friends on how to fix this.

Then, DJ played some fast instruments. Those drums made all of us to dance. It started to rain. So, we could not go out. Continued to hangout there till 1 pm. Then reached JUFA hotel.

It is 3.41 am now. Can see still there are some monks are sitting in the lobby and hacking on their projects. I am done for the day. Tomorrow, will be more interesting.

Thanks for all who encouraged my blog posts and photos.

Here are todays photos collections – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tshrinivasan/albums/72157683964819586