Arabic Wikipedia


The Arabic Wikipedia is the Arabic language version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of , it has articles, registered users and files and it is the 15th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks among Wikipedias. It was the first Semitic language to exceed 100,000 articles on 25 May 2009, and also the first Semitic language to exceed 1 million articles, on 17 November 2019.
The design of the Arabic Wikipedia differs somewhat from other Wikipedias. Most notably, since Arabic is written right-to-left, the location of links is a mirror image of those Wikipedias in languages written left-to-right. Prior to Wikipedia's update to MediaWiki, Arabic Wikipedia had a default page background of the site inspired by Arabic/Islamic tiling or ornament styles. Switching from MediaWiki's new default Vector layout to the original MonoBook layout may restore this page background.

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 :ar:نقاش المستخدم:Elian|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 4 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.
, Egypt, 27 February 2013
In 2008 the Wikipedia had 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 out of Egyptians, fewer than 10% "are thought 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 are around 630 active Arabic Wikipedia editors around the world. Ikram Al-Yacoub of Al Arabiya says that this is "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.

Blocking

The Arabic Wikipedia has been blocked in Syria with no official reasons given by the Syrian government. The block began on 30 April 2008 while all other language versions of Wikipedia remain unblocked and freely accessible. Wikimedia.org has also been blocked, which causes all images on Wikipedia to be unavailable. Tarawneh stated that wasta was used to unblock Wikipedia in Syria.

Evaluation and criticism

In June 2016, Arabic Wikipedia scored 233 in terms of depth. This is better than the German version, the French version or the Japanese version, making it the fifth highest +100,000 articles Wikipedia in the terms of depth, after English Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.
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.
According to Alexa Internet, on 26 November 2014, the Arabic Wikipedia is the 10th most visited language version of Wikipedia in terms of percentage of visitors on all of the Wikipedias 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 term of the article count. In terms of page views, it is ranked 12th with the same 10 Wikipedias above it plus the Polish and Dutch ones.
In 2019 the Arabic Wikipedia has 577 thousand unique categories and 1.1% of them do not have appropriate page in the category. The average article in this language version has 30 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.806. The largest number of articles has Culture and People category. In Arabic Wikipedia articles related to Religion and Military has the highest average quality. Content about Religion is read more often and has the highest authors' interest on average.
In mid of 2020, Arabic Wikipedia was criticized for deletion of Sarah Hegazi article. Some Arabic LGBT activists on Social Media accused Arabic Wikipedia's bias against the Arab LGBT community, and considered it part of censorship, hate-speech and homophobic in Middle East. Some news website like Raseef22 criticized Arabic Wikipedia's policie, and said that the project controlled by extremist supervisors who reject articles about minorities and gender gap.
In March 2020 the Arabic Wikipedia contained 3.6 million references, wherein 3.62% of them had the DOI identifier and 4.71% of references contained the ISBN number. Total share of articles on the Arabic Wikipedia with at least one reference was 79.23%. At the time it had 5.65% and 0.25% of articles with at least 10 and 100 references respectively.

Usage and page views by country

, 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.

June 2018

RankCountry% of views
1Saudi Arabia22.3%
2Egypt12.9%
3Morocco10.4%
4United States7.1%
5Algeria7.0%
6Iraq5.3%
7Jordan3.7%
8Kuwait3.0%
9United Arab Emirates2.9%
10Syria2.2%

As a percent of total Wikipedia views

Milestones

Logos in different fonts for Arabic Wikipedia: