WikiJabber

Rahul Deshmukh and Toni Ristovski at Wikimedia Conference 2018. Photo: Habib M’henni / Wikimedia Commons. License: CC-BY-4.0

Rahul Deshmukh from Mumbai, India is an active editor from Marathi Wikipedia. He is among the top 10 contributors on Marathi Wikipedia with more than 12,000 edits since 2001. He is also an admin since 2011 and founder admin of Marathi Wikisource.

Being an engineer by profession at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Rahul’s focus is to apply technological solutions to Wikimedia projects for better utilization contributor’s time for intellectual and creative work, and minimizing the labour work by use of automation. He is an advisor to Encyclopædia Board, Government of Maharashtra. He is also a member of Government of Maharashtra’s Language Advisory Board (Bhasha Sallagar Samiti). He was actively involved in making the Marathi Vishvakosh copyright free for public use.

Some of his major contributions include porting an offline version of Marathi Wikipedia on Android Tablet (Aakash), development of web font for Marathi Wikipedia, Wikipedia Arm based solution for Net-book, and pre-installation of it on Government of India Netbooks distributed to youth in rural India under Unnat Bharat Abhiyan. Apart from delivering lectures, speeches, interviews and conducting academies, he organized and organizes many events and activities for Marathi Wikipedia on regular basis. He is the mastermind behind the Marathi Wikipedia Hackathon, conducted annually every year at IIT Bombay, is the one of its kind Hackathon from India.

He was elected to the Wikimedia India Executive Committee in April 2017, and currently serves as the President. (Source: Wikimedia India)

Profile picture of Wikipedian Abhishek Suryawanshi. Photo: Jasanpictures. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

Abhishek Suryawanshi owns Masters in Health and Political Communication. He founded TEDxPune, is Ambassador of the Wikimedia Education Program and was President of Wikimedia New York City. Abhishek Suryawanshi lives in Boston.