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With more than 280 million native speakers, Arabic is one of the world’s most spoken languages, but the Arabic Wikipedia has lagged behind other language Wikipedias in terms of the amount of articles. The Arabic Wikipedia has only 205,000 articles — a tiny fraction in comparison to the English Wikipedia, which has 4.2 million articles. But the Arabic Wikipedia has been steadily growing over the last year, thanks in part to the efforts of college students in Egypt participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

The Wikipedia Education Program kicked off in Egypt with a Cairo pilot at two universities, Ain Shams University and Cairo University. The chart at right shows the amount of content added to the Arabic Wikipedia by students participating in the program. In the first term of the pilot, students added about 1.85 million bytes of content to the Arabic Wikipedia — an incredible achievement celebrated at a conference in Cairo in July 2012. In the second term of the pilot, which wrapped up in February 2013, students contributed even more, with over 5.97 million bytes of content added to the Arabic Wikipedia. In addition, students who we’ve introduced to editing through the Wikipedia Education Program have contributed an additional 515,000 bytes, meaning the program has brought a total of more than 8.34 million bytes to the Arabic Wikipedia.

Volunteer program leaders organized a second celebration conference at Cairo University on February 27, 2013. Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez, a professor of Spanish from Cairo University, opened the conference and spoke about the spirit of the program and its importance in the lives of students and teachers in terms of skills development and new experiences. Faris El-Gwely, the education program consultant who runs the program in Egypt, shared results from the second term, and the best students and Ambassadors from the program received certificates recognizing their hard work. Students and professors also shared information about their experiences in the program. See more photos from the conference.

The second celebration conference was a catalyst for the program to grow. Two more universities in northern Egypt have joined the program, Damanhour University and Kafr El-Sheikh University, as has Saint Khadija High School for Girls in Cairo. The drive from these programs comes from past students and Wikipedia Ambassadors who want to volunteer their time to further the spread of the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt:

• Walaa Abd El-Moneim, leader of the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University
• Doaa Saif El-Din, leader of the Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages), Ain Shams University
• Helana Raafat and Mina Saber, leaders of the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University
• Samir El-Sharabaty, commander of the Faculty of Education, Damanhour University

Egypt is not the only Arab World country to see growth in the Wikipedia Education Program. In the term that’s just beginning, universities in Algeria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have joined the program. All told, more than 45 classes will be editing the Arabic Wikipedia as part of their coursework this term.

In Jordan, Dr. Nidal Yousef of Isra University is one of five university professors teaching Wikipedia classes this term through the program. The Jordanian Teachers Association is also leading a program where high school students in every governorate in Jordan will be editing Wikipedia as part of their schoolwork, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors. Dr. Abd El-Haq Fareh of Algeria is also incorporating Wikipedia editing into his free software class this term. And Dr. Mohammed Alghbban and Dr. Sami Bin Slimah of King Saud University are leading a Wikipedia translation program in Saudi Arabia in their school’s languages department.

We look forward to seeing the Arabic Wikipedia continue to grow, thanks to these dedicated faculty leaders and students.

Faris El-Gwely, Education Program Consultant, Arab World
LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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Walaa Abdel Manaem

Walaa Abdel Manaem had browsed Wikipedia whenever she needed to find information about something, but she’d never contributed until March 2012. Walaa, a native of Giza, Egypt, was enrolled in Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez’s Spanish course at Cairo University. The course was participating in the pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt, and Dr. Abeer asked Walaa and her classmates to translate articles from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia about Latin American authors.

For Walaa, the experience was eye-opening. A master’s student in modern Spanish literature at Cairo University, Walaa found that she loved contributing to Wikipedia. She started by creating an article on Juan José Arreola, a Mexican short story writer, on April 5, 2012. And Walaa was hooked.

“I was very happy to participate in Wikipedia,” Walaa says. “I like studying Spanish and Latin American literature. Dr. Abeer was teaching us the method and the application of the translation of Spanish to Arabic and vice versa, and her specialty is Latin American literature. She told us that there is a little information about the Latin American writers in the Arabic Wikipedia.”

So Walaa set out to change that. Today, she has more than 8,500 edits, with 68 articles created. Her article on Juan José Arreola has reached Good Article status on the Arabic Wikipedia, and her article on The Well of Loneliness, a novel by British writer Radclyffe Hall, is soon to be a Featured Article on the Arabic Wikipedia. And Walaa is steadily climbing in the list of the top 500 editors to the Arabic Wikipedia.

More recently, Walaa has expanded her volunteer work for Wikipedia to include serving as a Campus Ambassador for Dr. Abeer’s class. She’s also helping out other classes doing Spanish and English translations as an Online Ambassador.

“I like working with Dr. Abeer because of her enthusiasm with her students to publish free knowledge,” Walaa says. “This assignment is very good and more suitable to our time, because our generation doesn’t use papers like a more traditional assignment.”

Although Walaa finished her M.A. preliminary year at Cairo University, she intends to keep contributing to the Arabic Wikipedia and expanding the availability of information available, especially in her favorite area, literature.

“My knowledge is published for all the world,” Walaa says about why she likes contributing to the Arabic Wikipedia. “I’m very happy when my work appears in Google as a part of Wikipedia and everyone can use it easily.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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“Wikipedia’s world is a beautiful world,” says Doaa Seif of Egypt. “You can see all cultures of the world through the window of a language that you know.”

Doaa hadn’t always known much about the Wikipedia world; a year ago, she was introduced to Wikipedia when the Wikipedia Education Program Cairo Pilot started at her university, Ain Shams University in Cairo. Doaa, a Cairo native, was excited about the prospect of becoming a Campus Ambassador for the program, and quickly signed up. Her classes did extremely well, and Doaa was hooked, so when she became a Teaching Assistant for the Faculty of Al-Alsun (languages) at Ain Shams, she immediately joined the program so her students in two separate courses, Hebrew and Research Methods, could also contribute to the Arabic Wikipedia.

“I know very well that my students have strong skills in language, and I want to invest these skills to enrich the Arabic content of the encyclopaedia in different languages — Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Turkish,” Doaa says. “In addition, I believe that we, as Arabs, have to enrich the Arabic content by ourselves.”

Editing the Arabic Wikipedia has become a daily habit for Doaa, and she envisions the additions she makes to the Arabic Wikipedia are improving knowledge of people in remote locations.

“Many of us are looking for information in a specific field and may not find anything about it on the Arabic Wikipedia,” she explains. “If I and also my students can add other useful information, why not do it? We know how to write about the culture of this language, or about its people or culture or politics, economy, tourism and senior political figures and literary state that speaks this language.”

In this way, Doaa believes, she and her students are helping improve information available not only about Arab countries, but also countries and people worldwide. In particular, Doaa specialized in studying Israeli society and the Hebrew language. She focused her scholarly work on Israeli theatre, and she wants to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia about these topics.

Doaa doesn’t just work within the classroom. In 2012, she organized a conference on how to edit Wikipedia, attended by more than 200 people at Ain Shams University. (See photos from the event here.) She wants to organize another international conference in Egypt, this time with thousands of attendees who are interested in spreading knowledge through contributing to Wikipedia.

“I dream of the day when the Arabic Wikipedia will be first in the number of articles and in the accuracy of the content,” Doaa says. “I also dream that Arabs will transcend barrier of writing in other languages to express ourselves and our culture in the other language Wikipedias.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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Workflow of the Taghreedat-Wikipedia editor project

Within the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Growth and Contribution Program, the Taghreedat^[1]-Wikipedia Editors project was piloted on the Arabic Wikipedia over four months between 1st June and 30th September 2012. The key idea was to attract new editors from among the followers of Taghreedat’s Twitter account, provide them with the proper training via online means (e.g. mails, tweets) and guide them through the basic steps of editing Wikipedia by requesting them to perform simple tasks on Wikipedia.

This pilot project concluded in a full study report showing the following key learnings:

• Social media channels, such as Twitter, could be very powerful in attracting new enthusiastic editors to Wikipedia.
• Sending emails to new editors with specific tasks, along with tutorials from the contribution portal, prompted a high rate of them to edit Wikipedia pages.
• Coaching new editors on various Wikipedia editing techniques using a step-by-step approach resulted in converting a considerable portion of them into repeated editors.
• On the average, editors who signed up under this program edit more often than other new users. This might be an early indicator that a project like this could make a meaningful contribution to the community of active Wikipedians.

Total number of edits made by Taghreedat volunteers on Arabic Wikipedia, along with the daily average of edits in each stage of the program.

The figure on the right plots the total number of edits made by 745 users who registered in this program (around 695 of them did not have a Wikipedia account before), showing an increase from 629 edits made before the program started, to 3410 edits by the time the report was prepared. The major milestones which contributed to the increase in the number of edits can be noticed when users started registration, and when users responded to the tasks of creating their userpages, wikifying articles, and categorizing them. The figure also shows the average number of daily edits, remarkably increasing from 7.8 edits/day during the registration stage to 36.3 edits/day at later stages of the program. This demonstrates the effect of more users joining the program since it has started, and that they are doing more edits as they become more familiar with Wikipedia editing.

About 43% of these registered accounts didn’t make any edits during the pilot program. On the other hand, about 20% of the participants made more than 4 edits. Considering that each task requires about one edit, it appears that a considerable portion of the users made further contributions, beyond just performing the tasks given to them.

Comparison between emailed users and average users by their number of edits

In order to understand the significance of these results, we compared the participants in this program with the aggregate of all users on Arabic Wikipedia categorized by their number of edits. The figure on the right shows that while only 1.7% of all users made more than 10 edits, 6.3% of the participants in this program did. In contrast, while 89.8% of all registered accounts on Arabic Wikipedia have never made any contribution, only 42.6% of the participants in this program remained inactive after registering.

As the number of registered users in this program increases, it might become difficult to coach, communicate, and collect data using the manual methods which we are utilizing in the current pilot. We are aiming at building an automatic system that offers a step-by-step training for interested users, while monitoring their performance, and collecting feedback from them.

Notes

1. ↑ Taghreedat, a non-profit Arabic digital content community building initiative, has launched the Arabic Wikipedia Editors Program which targets regular Internet users and train them (both online & offline) to become editors on Arabic Wikipedia. Taghreedat’s Twitter account has currently more than 100K followers.

Haitham Shammaa, Contribution Research Manager

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Helana Fola and Mina Saber are students of French Literature at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and neither had given much thought about contributing to Wikipedia or doing translations until they enrolled in Dr. Hoda Abaza’s French course in spring 2012. Dr. Hoda had signed up to participate in the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program, and was encouraging her students to translate high-quality articles from the French Wikipedia into the Arabic Wikipedia.

Helana Fola

“When I learned that I would write content for the Arabic Wikipedia, I was scared,” Helana says. “How will I write information that’s will be readen by millions?”

Helana didn’t want to translate articles from the French Wikipedia; she wanted to improve content about the Arab world on the Arabic Wikipedia. So Helana created the article on the Arabic Wikipedia events of 2011 in Egypt . She revised the article over and over, and with input from Wikipedia Ambassadors and other Arabic Wikipedia editors, she brought the article up to a Featured Article status on the Arabic Wikipedia.

“My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia is that I learned something new that’s useful to me and to my community,” Helana says. She’s also working on an article that had the chronology of the January 25 revolution in Egypt and has signed up to continue helping new students in the Wikipedia Education Program as an Ambassador in Cairo.

Mina Saber

Mina has also discovered translation skills from the Wikipedia assignment in Dr. Hoda’s class. He chose to translate and expand the article on the 2012 French presidential election (French original) (Arabic version).

“I was interested to know about the election and the political parties in France,” Mina says. “Dr. Hoda gave me the idea and I wrote the article using a lot of French newspapers and French Wikipedia articles as reference.”

Mina really enjoyed working on Wikipedia, and he was looking for his next topic to work on when tragedy struck the Ain Shams campus. Dr. Alaa Fayez, the president of Ain Shams, died in a car accident, and Mina decided he would write the article about him on the Arabic Wikipedia. Mina followed that by translating a Featured Article from the French Wikipedia about the history of Jews in Germany.

“My translation skills have improved, as have my knowledge and performance,” Mina says of the Wikipedia assignment. “My favorite part was having a new experience writing long articles on Wikipedia and seeing the page view statistics.”

Like Helana, Mina is now serving as a Wikipedia Ambassador to help new students learn how to edit Wikipedia in the next term of the Wikipedia Education Program. He credits Dr. Hoda and the Ambassadors, especially Faris El-Gwely, with helping him discover a passion for editing Wikipedia.

“I really liked the Wikipedia program, and I am happy we were given the opportunity to participate in this project,” Helana says.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

العربية

طلاب الأدب الفرنسي في القاهرة يكتشفون مهارات الترجمة من خلال مشروع ويكيبيديا

هيلانا رأفت و مينا صابر من طلاب الأدب الفرنسي في جامعة عين شمس في القاهرة، وكلاهما لم يفكرا كثيرا في المساهمة أو الترجمة في ويكيبيديا حتى التحقا بمادة الأدب الفرنسي لدى الدكتورة هدى أباظة في ربيع عام 2012. كانت الدكتورة هدى قد قامت بالتوقيع على المشاركة في مشروع برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي التجريبي في القاهرة، وقامت بتشجيع طلابها على ترجمة مقالات ذات جودة عالية من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية إلى ويكيبيديا العربية، أو كتابة مقالاتهم الخاصة.

هيلانا رأفت

“لقد أصبت بالرعب عندما علمت أنني سأكتب محتوى لويكيبيديا العربية،” كما تقول هيلانا. “كيف سأتمكن من كتابة معلومات سيقرأها الملايين؟”في البداية لم ترغب هيلانا في ترجمة المقالات من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية، لقد أرادت تطوير محتوى عن العالم العربي على ويكيبيديا العربية. أنشأت هيلانا مقالة أحداث 2011 في مصر على ويكيبيديا العربية ، وتعلقت بها. قامت بتنقيح المقالة مرارا وتكرارا، وبمساهمة من سفراء ويكيبيديا وغيرهم من محرري ويكيبيديا العربية، أوصلت المقالة إلى حالة المقالة المختارة على ويكيبيديا العربية.

“الجزء المفضل لدي حول الكتابة في ويكيبيديا هو أنني تعلمت شيئا جديدا مفيدا لي ولمجتمعي ،” كما تقول هيلانا. وهي تعمل أيضا على مقال عن التسلسل الزمني لثورة 25 يناير في مصر. ووافقت على الاستمرار في مساعدة الطلاب الجدد في برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي كسفير في القاهرة.

مينا صابر

وقد اكتشف مينا أيضا مهارات الترجمة من خلال التحرير على ويكيبيديا في صف الدكتورة هدى أباظة. ولقد اختار ترجمة وتوسيع مقالة 2012 انتخابات الرئاسة الفرنسية.

وقال مينا “كنت مهتما بالتعرف على الانتخابات والأحزاب السياسية في فرنسا، قامت الدكتورة هدى بتزويدي بالفكرة وكتبت المقالة باستخدام الكثير من مقالات الصحف الفرنسية ومقالات ويكيبيديا الفرنسية كمرجع.”

استمتع مينا حقا بالعمل في ويكيبيديا، وكان يبحث عن موضوع للعمل المقبل حين وقعت مأساة في حرم عين شمس حيث توفي الدكتور علاء فايز رئيس جامعة عين شمس في حادث سيارة، وقرر مينا انه بإمكانه كتابة مقالة عنه في ويكيبيديا العربية. تبع مينا ذلك بترجمة مقالة مختارة من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية عن تاريخ اليهود في ألمانيا.

يقول مينا عن فوائد ويكيبيديا “تحسنت مهارات الترجمة لدي، وكذلك معرفتي وأداءي، كان الجزء المفضل لدي هو حصولي على تجربة جديدة لكتابة مقالات طويلة في ويكيبيديا ورؤية إحصاءات مشاهدة الصفحة.”

هيلانا ومينا يخدمان الآن كسفيرا لويكيبيديا لمساعدة الطلاب الجدد في المرحلة التالية على تعلم كيفية تحرير ويكيبيديا في برنامج ويكيبيديا للتعليم. ويدينان بالشكر للدكتورة هدى أباظة وللسفراء، وخاصة فارس الجويلي، لمساعدته على اكتشاف شغف تحرير ويكيبيديا.

“أنا أحب حقا برنامج ويكيبيديا، وأنا سعيدة لإعطاءنا الفرصة للمشاركة في هذا المشروع،” كما تقول هيلانا.

ليانا ديفيس، مدير اتصالات برنامج ويكيبيديا للتعليم

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Snapshot of the Contribution Portal main page (Arabic)

Within the Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Growth and Contribution Program, the first phase of a new contribution portal project was piloted on the Arabic Wikipedia over four weeks between 18th June and 17th July 2012. According to a preliminary analysis, it appears to have a positive effect on the ratio of new editors who make contributions to Wikipedia.

The key idea of this first phase was to create a page with a simple design in order to test the overall concept, while monitoring the ability of new users to perform various simple Wikipedia tasks relying merely on reading visualized tutorial pages. The portal was named Bawabatu Almusharakah (Arabic : بوابة المشاركة), which is literally translated as “Contribution Portal” or “The Participation Gateway”. It is meant to evoke a space which provides help as well as an being an entrance point for newcomers to Wikipedia, enabling them to contribute to its contents and share the knowledge they possess, while collaborating and communicating with existing Wikipedia community members.

Tutorial showing first steps in creating a new article, starting from the search box (Arabic).

The design of this phase of the contribution portal consisted simply of a main portal page leading to visual help tutorials. The main page of the portal starts with the question “What would you like to do in Wikipedia?”, followed by six buttons each listing a possible answer (create a new article, user page or redirect, fix a typo, add a reference, or post a user talk page message), and linking to a corresponding step-by-step tutorial page. For the first test of the concept, we tried to keep the page design as simple as possible to avoid any visual distraction. We also aimed to use as little text as possible in order to quickly guide visitors to their target page without requiring much time for reading. (more…)

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"Welcome to Wikipedia" (Wikipedia brochure front cover in Arabic)

In English

The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to share the first draft of our Arabic Language Initiative strategy, and to invite applicants for the role of an Arabic Language Initiative Director (consultant) based in the region to lead the initiative. We are seeking a creative leader who is passionate about the mission of freely sharing the sum of all knowledge in Arabic. Great candidates will have an understanding of the challenges facing the Arabic Wikipedia and Arabic web content in general, and will have regional experience that enables him/her to navigate comfortably with communities from Marrakech to Muscat.

The Arabic Language Initiative was initiated in October 2011 as a catalyst strategy program alongside similar programs in Brazil and India. Our ultimate goal is developing a vibrant Arabic Wikipedia community that will build and sustain a rich encyclopedia that meets the aspirations of over 350 million Arabic speakers. Currently, there are 645 active Arabic Wikipedia contributors (as of April 2012) and we seek to expand this number to 1,000 within a year.

Over the past eight months, Wikimedia and the Arabic Wikimedia community have focused on empowering community participation in decision making, seeking out opportunities for partnerships in Arabic language countries, and learning from past and ongoing activities. Our approach for expanding the contribution base depends on online and offline programs. In April, we began work to design an editors contribution pilot program to develop new approaches to attracting and supporting new editors on Arabic Wikipedia. We have spent time in six countries (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia) to encourage the existing Wikipedia editors to build local communities and to form relationships with groups and organizations who share our mission and are interested in developing programs that help advance the Initiative.

We have already established partnerships with the Qatar Foundation’s Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) which provides partial financial support and seeks to develop supporting programs. We recently entered a partnership with Taghreedat, the popular Twitter-based initiative. They are planning to conduct Wikipedia workshops in a number of cities and are exploring other initiatives. We are working with groups in Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Lebanon to explore partnership opportunities and are on the look out for additional partners.

In July, we will conclude the first semester of the Education Pilot program in Cairo. To date, the seven participating classes at Cairo University and An-Shams University have successively contributed to editing 267 articles, adding more than 1.1 million bytes to the Arabic Wikipedia. We will be holding a workshop in Cairo at the beginning of July to review the results and plan the next steps for the program and we expect to expand the pilot in the coming months.

We will finalize the strategic plan after more community discussion and as we engage the Initiative Director. We welcome new ideas from the community and are seeking to support initiatives at the local level and/or new pilots on the wikis.

We believe in the strong opportunities of a growing and developing Arabic Wikipedia, and we need all hands in sustaining the growing momentum around the Arabic activities. Please keep an eye on our progress, share your ideas and actively reach out to us to become part of the mission that shall dramatically change the status of Arabic content on the web.

Moushira Elamrawy

Egypt-based Arabic Projects consultant

Campus of Médéa University

As part of the Arabic Language Initiative, I had the chance to visit Algeria in the last week of April, where I had the privilege to speak to students at Médéa University (Médéa Province) about Wikipedia and invite them to contribute to it.

With a size of almost 2,400,000 square kilometers, Algeria is the largest country in Africa and the Arab World, and the tenth-largest country in the world. Algeria has about 4.1 million internet users (12% of the total population of 35 million), however they contribute only 0.08% of the total global edits on Wikimedia projects. While the official language of Algeria is Modern Standard Arabic, French as the ”de-facto” co-official language is still widely used in government, culture, media, and education due to the country’s colonial history. This fact can be clearly noticed in the readership numbers of Wikimedia projects in Algeria: While 52.2% of Wikimedia traffic from Algeria went to French language pages in the first quarter of 2012, Arabic language traffic shared only 30.7%. Having said this, the share of Arabic language traffic has almost doubled in the past three years, from only 17.0% back in mid 2009.

In particular, I could feel the passion for reading and adding content to Arabic language Wikimedia projects during my visit to Médéa University, where I delivered a lecture about contributing to Arabic Wikimedia projects, followed by an editing workshop over two days organized by Dr. Fareh Abdelhak. The introductory lecture laid out the current situation of Wikipedia contributions from Algeria, and a few thoughts on how Wikipedia works, and why is it important to contribute new content to Wikimedia projects. The lecture ended by giving the attendants (about 130, most of them students) a homework exercise: To think of one person they respect and one of their famous quotes, in addition to translating a topic from the English or French Wikipedia or writing an article based other sources that does not exist on the Arabic Wikipedia. Later on, I was informed that the students posted a report in Arabic about the lecture, and shared the homework on Facebook, so more interested people would be able to join the workshop on the next day.

Students attending the editing workshop at Médéa University

Although Friday was a day off at the university, about 30 students managed to come in the morning to attend the editing workshop. Unfortunately, since most of the university facilities were closed, we couldn’t use the PC rooms and provide every student with a PC. However, this situation did not preclude students from joining the workshop using their private portable PCs, where each group of 3 to 4 students had to share one PC with their colleagues.

The session started by registering a user account on the Arabic Wikiquote. Wikiquote was chosen as a start for two reasons, first to raise awareness about Wikipedia’s sister projects, and secondly in order to enable students adding content directly in their first edits without much interference from the larger Wikimedia community. Most students managed to register an account smoothly, and we started adding pages with the texts that most of the students had prepared as their homework. After students had learned the wiki basics on Wikiquote, we moved to the Arabic Wikipedia to start adding new articles there.

The workshop session resulted in creating 8 new articles on Wikipedia and 10 new pages on Wikiquote. At the end of the workshop, most of the students answered positively to a question on whether they will continue to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia. Indeed, in the evening I noticed that some of the students who attended the workshop went back to the Arabic Wikipedia and Wikiquote and continued improving their previously added articles, and also added new content. Later on, I received a message on my discussion page saying “When we meet next year, I will have already created a number of pages that exceeds yours!”… I really wish you will!

Haitham Shammaa, Editor Growth and Contribution Program consultant

The Wikimedia Foundation continues to build momentum around activities focused on the Arabic language region. At the end of March, Barry Newstead visited the region and Moushira Elamrawy (Consultant, Arabic Language Initiative) conducted a number of outreach activities in various Arabic speaking countries. The Arabic Language initiative is a strategic priority for the movement and the Foundation. The visit sought to establish relationships with potential partners and to begin a dialogue on the importance of building Arabic Wikipedia as part of regional efforts to expand Arabic language content on the Internet.

The first stop was at the Dead Sea in Jordan.  Moushira was invited by the e-mediat program to conduct a workshop for participants from more than 20 NGOs from Lebanon and Jordan.  Several Lebanese and Jordanian NGOs working in the areas of history preservation, video blogging, and human rights showed interest in organizing Wikipedia sessions for their members and incorporating their up-to-date, sourced data from their research into Wikipedia articles. According to a recent study, Jordan’s contribution to online content is mainly in Arabic, and the country is one of the main contributors to the 3 percent of global online content that is in Arabic, an interesting fact which opens doors to fruitful activities.

Session about Wikipedia in Tetouan

Next Moushira traveled to Morocco, which, despite its reputation as a francophone country, is the 4th largest content contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia. Her first stop was Tetouan, in northern Morocco, where she hosted a session at The National School of Education, a government-funded higher education institute. It included a talk about Wikipedia by Fayssal, a local of Tetouan and a longtime Wikipedian (formerly a member of the English Wikipedia’s arbitration committee), and Zack, a significant contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia from Meknes, who led a workshop on how to edit Wikipedia. The attendees asked rich and diverse questions, e.g. on neutrality, fundraising, and how the Arabic Wikipedia could be improved. The school administration was excited about hosting more sessions and about considering how Wikipedia could be efficiently incorporated in their curriculum.

(more…)

Having just returned from a weeklong trip to Cairo, I am happy to report that the Cairo education pilot project is off to an exciting start! As one of the newest wings of the Wikipedia Education Program, the Cairo Pilot aims to increase the quality and quantity of the Arabic Wikipedia by working with university professors who incorporate Wikipedia-editing into their classes. As described in my earlier blog post, to keep this pilot small we are involving only the top 5-15 students from a small number of classes this term (see the detailed Cairo Pilot program plan).

Cairo University students practice editing Wikipedia in a workshop led by Campus Ambassadors, March 2012.

The academic term began last month, and already the participating classes are showing great enthusiasm and promise. After participating in a faculty workshop in January — where the Cairo professors learned more about how Wikipedia works and tips around designing Wikipedia assignments from local Wikipedians and a Wikipedia Education Program faculty veteran (Rochelle Davis of Georgetown University) — the participating faculty members have incorporated innovative Wikipedia projects into their respective classes. For example, in Professor Hany Hosseiny’s mathematics class at Cairo University, students will do extensive research and write Arabic articles about famous mathematicians and mathematical concepts. Most of the students in the Cairo Pilot will do the majority of on-wiki editing in April and May, although Professor El-Toukhy’s postgraduate French students at Ain Shams University have already begun translating entire Wikipedia articles from French to Arabic (they plan to finish translating the entire 12-page-long article Civil Disobedience within the next ten days, after which they’ll move on to translating at least three other long articles). It is also worth mentioning that the vast majority of students in the pilot are women.

The Wikipedia Ambassadors in Cairo have been doing a great job explaining Wikipedia policies and editing skills to students, and the participating professors and students are very excited to play such a big role in growing Arabic free knowledge.

-Annie Lin (آني/سمر)
Wikipedia Education Program Manager