On behalf of Wikimedia India, I hereby announce the Featured Wikimedian for November 2017.
Balaji Jagadesh is one of the top contributors from the Tamil Wikimedia community. Though he started contributing since 2009, he was quite active after his participation in WikiConference India 2011. Initially he started contributing to Tamil Wikipedia, but was later attracted towards Tamil Wikisource, Tamil Wikitionary, and Wikidata. His global contributions count to whooping 2,50,000 edits. He is an admin on Tamil Wikitionary.
After his interaction with Mr. Loganathan (User:Info-farmer), Balaji was very much motivated to contribute to Wikimedia projects. He says, "When I was editing in Tamil Wikipedia, I used to translate science articles from English to Tamil. But faced problem in finding equivalent Tamil words. The English to Tamil dictionaries were inadequate. Hence I felt the need to work in the Tamil Wikitionary. After a while there was a collaboration with Tamil Wikisource and Tamil Nadu Government through Tamil Virtual University through 2000 CC0 books were uploaded".
As an active contributor to Wikidata, he says that the vision of Wikimedia movement is, "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge", but with Wikidata we can make it, "Imagine a world in which every single human being and every single machine can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Apart from regular contributions, he also created templates to Tamil Wikimedia projects, and also maintains Tamil Wikisource's official Twitter handle.
Balaji hails from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, and is a post-graduate is Physics. He currently works as a Senior Geophysicist in Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC).
Any editor can propose a fellow to be a Featured Wikimedia at: http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Featured_Wikimedian/Nominations