She will be one among the 10 persons selected from the country and one among the two persons selected from the State for participating in Wikimania 2013, an annual international conference of the Wikimedia movement, to be held in Hong Kong, China between August 7 and 11.
S. Parvathi, a Tamil teacher at Panchayat Union Middle School, Kandampatti in Salem rural block, has contributed 500 articles, edited 10,500 articles and wrote three books for children in the Tamil language edition of Wikipedia and was selected for her continuous contribution to the portal.
Talking about her journey in the knowledge world, she said that while searching for projects for class eight students in the website, she could not find suitable documents in Tamil and that made her mind to contribute something to the growth of development of the language. “It is the passion towards Tamil that started contributions in 2001. An article on Onam festival was published as main story and it motivated me,” she said.
The Tamil Wikipedia currently has 52,000 articles when compared to 12 lakh in English. It is the second largest Wikipedia among Indian languages by article count and 59 largest in the world. Ms. Parvathi along with Sengai Podhuvan from Chennai were selected for contributions to Tamil while the rest eight were selected for their contributions in Oriya, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi.
Her contributions were in subjects dealing with noble laureates, scientists, Tamil literature and grammar apart from general issues. “Penetration of internet is increasing and more articles in Tamil are becoming essential nowadays,” added the teacher.
Though there is no financial incentive for posting articles and editing works, she is happy about the contributions to the growth of Tamil language. She wanted more women to contribute for the Tamil Wikipedia and be a part of knowledge sharing society.
About 2,500 people representing 200 languages are expected to take part in the conference that would help them to learn and share experience and come out with new knowledge initiatives across the world.
