Trichy women turn contributors to Tamil Wiki

Women from various were trained on opening in – a multilingual web-based free content encyclopedia, as part of the women’s month celebration by Wikipedia.

Participants were encouraged to information and related to women’s wellbeing.

Parvathi Sri, a teacher by profession and an administrator-cum-user of Wikipedia, has contributed over 600 articles in Wikipedia. She said that the participants were exposed to the health-related issues faced by women and need for related information online so that they are kept informed on such issues.

She became a user in 2011 after finding very limited information about a famous Tamil novelist in the internet. After opening a user account, she started contributing to Wikipedia and went on to become an administrator.

She said that Wikipedia is available in 285 languages and there is very less content in . This prompted her to contribute to Tamil Wikipedia, she added.

Encouraged to contribute information for Tamil Wikipedia for the past year, a secondary grade teacher from a government-aided school in Karaikudi, Pa Thendral said that such inputs are of great help for researchers and anyone can contribute to it.

She gained interest after attending a programme jointly organised by Wikipedia and state council of educational research and training (SCERT) a couple of years ago in Chennai. Since then she has been contributing information about unknown Tamil authors and writers in her region.

Members created a user account in Wikipedia and were educated on how to use the software to upload information and multimedia content.