Arabic Wikipedia

History

At the emergence of the Wikipedia project in 2001, there were calls to create an Arabic domain raised by Arab engineers. The domain was created as "ar.wikipedia.org" but no serious activity took place except with anonymous users who experimented with the idea. Until 7 February 2003, all contributors to the Arabic Wikipedia were non-Arab volunteers from the International Project Wikipedia that handled the technical aspects. Elizabeth Bauer, who used the user name Elian in the Arabic Wikipedia, approached many Arabic speakers who potentially might be interested in volunteering to spearhead the Arabic project. The only group who responded was the ArabEyes team who were involved in Arabizing the Open Source initiatives. Elian's request was conservatively received and the ArabEyes team was ready to participate but not take a leadership role and then declined to participate on the second of February 2003. During this negotiation time, volunteer users from the German Wikipedia project continued to develop the technical infrastructure of the Arabic Wikipedia backbone.

In 2003, Rami Tarawneh (), a Jordanian PhD student in Germany who originated from Zarqa, encountered the English Wikipedia and began to edit content. Contributors encouraged him to start an Arabic Wikipedia. The Arabic Wikipedia opened in July 2003. By that year a significant group of contributors included Tarawneh and four other Jordanians studying in Germany.

On 7 February 2004, one member from the ArabEyes, Isam Bayazidi (), volunteered with four other friends to be involved with the Arabic Wikipedia and assumed some leadership roles. In 2004, Bayazid was assigned the SysOp responsibilities and he, with another 5 volunteers, namely Ayman, Abo Suleiman, Mustapha Ahmad and Bassem Jarkas are considered to be the first Arabs to lead the Wikipedia project and they are attributed for working on translating and enforcing the English policies to Arabic. The Arabic Wikipedia faced many challenges at its inception. In February 2004, it was considered to be the worst Wikipedia project among all other languages. However, in 2005, it showed phenomenal progress by which in December 2005, the total number of articles reached 8,285. By that time, there were fewer than 20 contributors and the administrators and contributors made efforts to recruit new users.

In 2007 the secret police in an unspecified country detained Tarawneh and demanded that he reveal the IP address of a contributor. To protect the Wikipedian, the administrators forged a dispute that was the presumed reason for Tarawneh losing his administrator access, so the secret police was unable to obtain the IP. In response to the incident, the rules now state that no one user may have access to all information about the Wikipedia's users.

In 2008 the Arabic Wikipedia had fewer than 65,000 articles and was ranked No. 29 out of the Wikipedias, behind the Esperanto Wikipedia and the Slovenian Wikipedia. Noam Cohen of The New York Times reported that, to many of the attendees of the 2008 Wikimania conference in Alexandria, Egypt, the "woeful shape of the Arabic Wikipedia has been the cause of chagrin." Cohen stated that fewer than 10% of Egyptians are estimated to have internet access and of those with internet access many tend to be knowledgeable in English and have a preference of communicating in that language. The Arabic Wikipedia had 118,870 articles as of 15 January 2010.

As of July 2012 there were around 630 active Arabic Wikipedia editors around the world. Ikram Al-Yacoub of Al Arabiya said that this was "a relatively low figure." At the time there were hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles on the Arabic Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation and the nonprofit group Taghreedat established the "Arabic Wikipedia Editors Program" intended to train users to edit the Arabic Wikipedia. By the end of June 2014, the number of articles had reached 384,000.

Iraqi volunteers have translated much of English Wikipedia into Arabic Wikipedia. More recently, a project named Bayt Alhikma has translated more than 10,000 articles about science and other topics in Arabic. The number of active users in Arabic Wikipedia is increasing quickly, reaching the 10,000 mark for first time on 10 February 2021.

Evaluation

At Wikimania 2008, Jimmy Wales argued that high-profile arrests like those of Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer could be hampering the development of the Arabic Wikipedia by making editors afraid to contribute.

In 2010, Tarek Al Kaziri, from Radio Netherlands Worldwide, believed that the Arabic Wikipedia reflected the Arabic reality in general. Low participation lowers the probability that the articles are reviewed, developed and updated, and political polarisation of participants is likely to lead to biases in the articles.{{cite web |script-title=ar:ويكيبيديا والعرب: خلل في المشروع أم في الثقافة؟ |access-date=8 July 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131010034755/http://www.rnw.nl/arabic/article/%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8-%D8%AE%D9%84%D9%84-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B4%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B9-%D8%A3%D9%85-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AB%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%A9%D8%9F |archive-date=10 October 2013 |url-status=dead

According to Alexa Internet, on 26 November 2014, the Arabic Wikipedia was the 10th most visited language version of Wikipedia over a month, with the "ar.wikipedia.org" subdomain attracting approximately 1.8% of the total visitors of the "wikipedia.org" website, despite being ranked no. 22 in terms of the article count. In terms of page views, it was ranked 11th in September 2018 with the same nine Wikipedias above it plus the Polish one. Among the larger Wikipedias, it has one of the lowest ratios of new editors retention and one of the highest rates of edit reversions.

Usage and page views by country

Florence Devouard, the former president of the Wikimedia Foundation, stated in 2010 that the largest number of articles on the Arabic Wikipedia were written by Egyptians and that the Egyptians were more likely to participate in the Arabic Wikipedia compared to other groups.

Generally, Arabic Wikipedia, as of 2018, is the most popular language version of Wikipedia in most Arab countries, except Tunisia, Comoros, Chad, Lebanon, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE. Arabic Wikipedia has its highest percentages in Egypt, Libya and the countries of the Levant (except Israel and Lebanon) and the Arabian peninsula. This discrepancy happens because of the deficits of Wikipedia in Arabic regarding quality and quantity, while in the latter three the lead of English there is associated with the fact that most residents there are migrants from various countries, such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines and other countries, where English is the most popular language there.

As of December 2022, Arabic receives around to 180 to 260 million pageviews per month, depending on the season. The most pageviews are recorded in winter and spring.

Censorship

Saudi Arabia

Ba'athist Syria

Criticisms and controversies

Allegations of bias

The Arabic Wikipedia has been criticized for an alleged Middle Eastern-centric content bias on religious and political topics. A 2014 Wired article described the Arabic Wikipedia, with over 690,000 registered users and more than 240,000 articles, as being "far more than a translation of its English counterpart." Its articles often reflect a worldview shaped by the region's religious and political sensitivities, differing significantly from Western perspectives. Wired reported that Jordanians, upon viewing the English Wikipedia, felt it portrayed what they saw as a racist depiction of Arabs, particularly in representations of Arabs in the desert with camels, and started their own Wikipedia as a result.

During the Gaza war, the Arabic Wikipedia website displayed a logo in the colors of the Palestinian flag and a banner urging "an end to the genocide", sparking criticism from the Wikimedia Israel and other Israeli commentators. The site also shut down for one day (on 23 December 2023) in solidarity with Gaza. Users were unable to edit during the blackout.

A June 2024 article in the Jerusalem Post criticized the Arabic Wikipedia's article on the war for downplaying Hamas' attacks on civilians and Iran's involvement, among other issues.

Criticism of content

In mid-2020, the Arabic Wikipedia was criticized for deleting its version of the article on Sarah Hegazi after a deletion discussion that found there was a consensus the article did not meet the criteria for notability. Some Arabic LGBT activists on social media accused the Arabic Wikipedia of bias against the LGBT community, and claim the action to be part of censorship, hate-speech, and homophobia in the Middle East. The news website Raseef22 criticized Arabic Wikipedia's policies, and said that the project was controlled by prejudiced administrators who reject articles about minorities and women. The administrators of the Arabic Wikipedia said that the deletion process is a normal procedure and has nothing to do with the subject or targeting specific issues.

In April 2022, the European Union's East StratCom Task Force reported that four pro-Kremlin disinformation news outlets (SouthFront, NewsFront, InfoRos and Strategic Culture Foundation) were referenced in 70 articles of the Arabic Wikipedia. This made it the second Wikipedia edition most affected by such disinformation, behind the Russian Wikipedia.

References

Notes

References

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4. "المستشار / طارق قابيل".
5. [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org Archived discussions about International languages. Refer to section "Provisional is Best, Sort by Population".] ''meta.wikimedia.org''. {{Webarchive. link. (8 December 2019 . Note the comment "Outside jokes, the french and german wikipedias is more developed than the one of hindi or Arab." Last accessed 4 August 2014.)
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7. "We have a problem!".
8. (1 August 2003). "ويكيبيديا:الميدان".
9. [[:ar:نقاش المستخدم:Stevertigo. The discussion page of Svertigo that shows the non-Arab volunteers working on the Arabic Wikipedia in late 2003]]. ''Arabic Wikipedia''.
10. Su, Alice. (14 February 2014). "In the Middle East, Arabic Wikipedia is a flashpoint – and a beacon". [[Condé Nast]].
11. Panović, Ivan (2010). [https://www.academia.edu/363979/The_Beginnings_of_Wikipedia_Masry "The Beginnings of Wikipedia Masry"]. {{Webarchive. link. (23 January 2016. ''Al-Logha, Series of Papers in Linguistics''. 8: 93–127. (Sourced content from p. 94).)
12. "X!'s tools".
13. These were [[:ar:مستخدم:أيمن. Ayman]], [[:ar:مستخدم:أبو سليمان. Abo Suleima]], [[:ar:مستخدم:مصطفى. Mustapha]] [[:ar:مستخدم:أحمد. Ahmad]] and [[:ar:مستخدم:Bassem JARKAS. Bassem Jarkas]].
14. [[:ar:ويكيبيديا:إحصاءات ويكيبيديا العربية. Wikipedia Statistics - Arabic Wikipedia. Accessed on 4 August 2014.]] (in Arabic).
15. Cohen, Noam. (21 July 2008). "In Egypt, Wikipedia is more than hobby". [[International Herald Tribune]].
16. Al-Yacoub, Ikram (19 July 2012). [http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/19/227328.html {{"'Taghreedat' to offer Arab Tweeps their own search engine"]. ([https://web.archive.org/web/20130206141148/http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/19/227328.html Archive]) ''[[Al Arabiya]]''. Retrieved on 24 August 2012.
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18. (8 October 2019). "Spread the word: the Iraqis translating the internet into Arabic".
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27. Su, Alice. (12 February 2014). "In the Middle East, Arabic Wikipedia Is a Flashpoint — And a Beacon".
28. "Requests for comment/Requesting a look into Arabic Wikipedia Bias - Meta".
29. Goldberg, Yitz. (17 Jan 2024). "Factual encyclopedia or Hamas propaganda?".
30. Byron, Avior. (2 June 2024). "Truth held hostage: Language differences in Wikipedia's 'Israel-Hamas War' page – opinion".
31. (2023-12-23). "Wikipedia Arabic closes its site for 24 hours in solidarity with Gaza".
32. Al Waheidi, Majd. (2020-08-06). "A prominent gay Egyptian activist committed suicide. Arabic Wikipedia deleted her page.".
33. Babily, Dima. (3 July 2020). "ويكيبيديا وقصة سارة حجازي تثيرويكيبيديا وقصة سارة حجازي تثير الجدل حول المعايير التحريرية وحرية التعبير".
34. Allam, Samla. (23 June 2020). "بعد حذف صفحة التعريف بسارة حجازي… كيف تُدار "ويكيبيديا العربية"؟".
35. (2022-04-19). "Pro-Kremlin Disinformation Outlets Referenced By Hundreds Of Wikipedia Articles". [[East StratCom Task Force.