After successfully adding more than 22,000 articles to its credit, Malayalam wikimedia is dynamic with a new project.
The wikimedians are busy collecting audio files of prominent personalities, birds, animals, ensemble of percussion instruments and folk songs.
Opening up wide possibilities for researchers and students, the contributors have already uploaded voices of prominent personalities such as O N V Kurup, Paul Zacharia, poet D Vinayachandran and P K Medhini among others. Interestingly, media files of birds such as black drongo, red-wattled lapwing, white-cheeked barbet and oriental magpie-robin also feature in the project. Among animals, audios of fox and squirrel have been added. People can tune into Malayalam wikimedia to hear ‘naverupattu’, ‘pandimelam’, ‘kummattipattu’,’pulikottu’, etc. “Including features like pictures and audios makes an article more informative,” says Manoj K from Thrissur, who contributed voice clips of ‘naverupattu’, ‘kummattipattu’ etc to wikimedia.
Manoj, a BTech graduate, is also active in projects like Wiki Grandhasala which concerns digitisation of copyright-free books. Kannan Shanmugham, a teacher from Kollam, feels the project has immense possibilities. “This has the potential to grow as a major resource space.
Compared to the involvement of people in social networking sites such as facebook, twitter etc, Malayalam wikimedia is moving at a slow pace. But it has several path-breaking initiatives such as Wiki Grandhasala, Wiki Nikhandu etc,” he says.
Kannan has added voiceovers of several personalities from the socio-political field of the state. “P K Medhini’s song was exclusively recorded for the wiki project while speeches of others were collected from public functions. We have plans to add more voice clips,” he adds.