Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Community Spotlight: Odia Wikimedia community released a new converter for IPA and Roman conversion to better Wiktionary, and other news in brief

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• The Odia Wikimedia community has just released a new converter to convert the Odia-alphabet text into international phonetic standards like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Romanization to better pronunciation on Wiktionary
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On May 2, the Odia Wikimedia community has released a new freely-licensed converter that can convert the Odia text into International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Romanization, two major standards used globally for writing phonetic notations. The converter is released under GNU General Public License v3.0 along with its documentations under a Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA 3.0). This is the fifth converter of the family released by the community where the other four are already in use on Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource. The source code of the converter is forked from a converter that a fellow Wikimedian Jnanaranjan Sahu created on Odia Wikipedia by combining the aforementioned converters created by multiple developers from the community. Those four converters convert various legacy encodings that are still in use instead of Unicode for typeset and the lack of Unicode acceptance largely stops a huge amount of content to come online. A few years back until those converters were made available, the Wikimedia community were struggling to convert massive amount of acquired e-books for Wikisource, and the Odia language media and social media users were entirely dependent on legacy encoding standards.

This tool was a great necessity for the Wiki projects. While making some new entries in Odia Wikitionary, we faced the problem of writing the Odia pronunciations in IPA/Roman formats. One had to search the symbols and type it manually. It was a tedious job, considering the fact much typing tools aren't available for these two formats and each words take at least 5-6 minutes. But with the release of this new converter, things have become far easier. It will help immensely those who need to use the phonetic formats, not only in Wikitionary, but in other Wiki projects too. Still there were some glitches first, which caused a little headache for the developers. After going through the code for some time a minor bug was found which caused the problem. However, now it is fixed and words can be converted both in IPA and Roman phonetic formats easily.

Odia Wikimedia community signs a letter of intent with city authority to collaborate on GLAM projects

The Odia Wikimedia community has signed a letter with the Bhubaneswar Development Authority, an public corporation of the city of Bhubaneswar which is the capital of the Indian state of Odisha. This letter—addressed to Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Katherine Maher—details how the corporation intends to work with the Odia Wikimedia community on several projects including the documentation of 100 select heritage sites across the city on their website BhubaneswarOne.in.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Bikash Ojha, Odia Wikimedians