Fighting For climate change is at its best in the Arabic region: Follow-up on the region’s recent activities.

For the 3rd year in a row, the Arabic community is participating actively in the #WikiForHumanRights campaign. The focus this year was taking action against the climate change crisis.

The central activity this year was the biological diversity contest organized in the Arabic Wikipedia to document the Arabic names of species worldwide.

The kick-off of this season’s webinar was a webinar held on the Zoom platform. Other local activities were taking place in all the Arabic regions: UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Lybia & Morocco.

The opening event was a webinar held using the Zoom platform. Shadi Hambo, a researcher in biology and a Ph.D. student at Dresden University, was invited to explain the Taxonamoy system in Arabic showing why it exists and how we can use it. Dr. Michel BAKNI, the host of this meeting also talked about the Arabization of the Taxonamoy showing the importance of the process.

The diversity contest was a huge success that overcomes all the previous expectations. The goal was to enrich articles with references that document the Arabic name of the species using the famous CiteQ template.

11 biological dictionaries were added to Wikidata, and participants share invited to use them. As a result, +10500 citations were added to Arabic Wikipedia, and +3000 item species were named in Arabic in Wikidata. Other activities were also in separate places in the Arabic region.

An Edit-a-than focusing on climate change and biodiversity was held at the University of Sharjah for students in the Department of foreign languages, the event was organized by a UAE user group. Another edit-a-thon was also held in Amman, Jordan focusing on desertification, Wikimedia Levant was in charge of organizing the event! Several events were also held in Arabic as well in Libya (Seminar in Benghazi) and Morocco (an Editing contest).

The Arabic community is playing an active role in fighting against the climate crisis using Arabic Wikipedia and the sister projects to raise awareness of the threat that is around us all!