Thank You/Poongothai Balasubramanian

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I taught math for 33 years. My students kept me feeling young, and reminded me how much I love my country.
When I retired, my son was worried I would get rusty. So he introduced me to Wikipedia. He explained that anyone can contribute, and showed me how.

Since then, I've created articles on quadratic functions, probability, charts, graphs and more. I've made 7,000 edits in all.

I write in Tamil: my favorite language and my mother tongue, spoken by 85 million people across the world. I've also uploaded more than 6,000 audio files to Wiktionary, demonstrating proper pronunciations for common Tamil words. Now, more people can share in this beautiful language.

As a teacher and a mother, I was always busy. But now that I'm retired and my children are grown, my time is my own &mdash; all 24 hours of it! And I spend every day on Wikipedia.

I'm a volunteer. No one pays me. But helping edit Wikipedia has become my life's work. Even though I'm not in the classroom, I'm still doing what I care about most: helping a new generation of students learn, in the language I love.

Thank you,

Poongothai Balasubramanian

''Poongothai Balasubramanian lives in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, where she taught for many years. She began editing Wikipedia in 2010. Since then, she's created 250 articles and recorded pronunciations for 6,000 words. Her Wikipedia username is inspired by her favorite novel, To Kill A Mocking Bird.''

Video Attribution: by Victor Grigas, under [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported], from Wikimedia Commons.

Image Attribution: by Adam Novak, under [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported], from Wikimedia Commons.