Wikipedia hires Kerala based techie
By Suneetha

Wikipedia has strong roots in India, and is among the top ten websites here. Wikimedia has announced the new engineering team for their internationalization / Localization features. The four new faces announced include Santhosh Thottingal, a FOSS evangelist from Kerala, currently employed with Infosys, who has been associated with Wikimedia projects since a couple of years.

The Wiki announcement says  that the ‘I18n/L10n team will focus on design and development of open source tools to improve screen font rendering on web browsers using open web fonts, input method tools including keymaps and transliteration software to support Non-Roman languages specifically starting with Indic languages this year.’

Highly regarded in the industry, Santhosh has been in the aerospace and automotive related IT industry for the last 6 years. His FOSS projects have been in the area of language computing, mostly in his mother tongue Malayalam. He is a lead developer for Dhvani, an Indic language TTS, SILPA, an Indic language computing framework and a Pango-Cairo based PDF rendering library. He is also the project administrator of the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing FOSS developer community. The Malayalam Wikipedia and Wikisource offline versions are his major contributions and he is currently a member of Wikimedia Language Committee.

The Wiki announcement further says that ‘as a team member of the I18n team, Santhosh hopes to develop features that all Wikis can use to display and render all languages. Santhosh comes from a farmers' family and is passionate about farming. He is an avid reader and has helped the Malayalam Wikisource community digitize and archive many precious works from Malayalam literature. ‘ .  He will join Wikipedia on Sept 19, 2011.

To know more about Santhosh check out his blog