The 20th Arabic Wikipedia Day: A Step Towards Supporting the Community and Responding to its Needs

Introduction

Arabic Wikipedia is the Arabic edition of Wikipedia. It was launched on July 9, 2003, and as of August 23, 2024, it contained 1,239,476 articles, with 2,612,675 registered members, including 3,718 active users and 52,729 uploaded files. Arabic Wikipedia ranks 16th among Wikipedia editions in terms of the number of articles, and 8th in depth, surpassing the Russian, Italian, German, and Spanish Wikipedias.

Arabic Wikipedia Day

Starting in 2018, the Arabic Wikipedia community agreed that the event would be held on the first Saturday after July 9 each year, marking the anniversary of the Arabic edition’s launch.

The event aims to unite efforts to improve the encyclopedia. Arabic Wikipedia suffers from a relatively small number of articles compared to other less popular languages. Many Arabic Wikipedia articles lack sources, and there is a significant shortage of scientific articles. Therefore, this day encourages people to volunteer and contribute to Arabic Wikipedia, enriching Arabic content on the internet.

The 20th Arabic Wikipedia Day

The event took place on July 13, 2024, with more than 96 participants, resulting in the creation of 587 articles, review 113 articles, 953 edits, development five articles, two lists.

Organizing Team: At a previous meeting for the 19th Arabic Wikipedia Day, our colleague Donia invited a group of senior and active members of the Arab community to meet with a group of beginners to encourage them to get involved in the community and increase their contributions. During the discussions, the idea of early planning for the 20th Wikipedia Day emerged. With the encouragement of attendees, Donia from Egypt, Luma from Iraq, and Mohammed Hajjawi from Palestine volunteered to be the core organizing team for the event.

Plan: The team held its first meeting on January 1, 2024. During the discussions about possible activities, the organizers agreed on two key principles: activities should address the needs of the Arab community and be sustainable beyond the event. This led to the idea of distributing a survey to the Arab community to explore its needs. The survey analysis revealed several issues.

Community Needs:

1. A shortage of articles in certain categories, especially scientific ones (e.g., botany), historical topics, and issues related to Arab causes such as the Palestinian issue, and the Sudanese and Libyan crises.
2. Lack of awareness of Wikipedia policies, insufficient high-quality content, limited multimedia, organizational challenges within work teams, and a lack of active editors, making the encyclopedia less attractive to new contributors.
3. The Arab community’s need for regular meetings to discuss the latest updates and exchange ideas.
4. Weaknesses in language skills impacting article quality, leading to many articles being nominated for deletion due to poor language or literal translations.
5. Some contributors interested in organizing competitions are unaware of how to plan and execute them before, during, and after the competition.

Solutions:

1. To facilitate finding the required categories, we created a page for the 20th Arabic Wikipedia Day, with the help of Mohammed Qays and Sandra Hanbo, listing the needed categories. Volunteers created articles during the event, and the page remains available for further editing.
2. We addressed the second issue by compiling resources, including a collection of previously produced videos, links to workshops, and PDF files on various topics. This allows newcomers to easily access these resources.
3. We posted an announcement in the community forum about the need for regular meetings and agreed to hold quarterly meetings. Sandra Hanbo volunteered to organize these meetings with the support of colleagues Manar and Farida from the foundation.
4. We organized a course titled “Arabic Writing: Skills and Rules” led by Dr. Yahya Mir Alam, supported by Dr. Michel Bakni, Sandra Hanbo, and Dr. Ayman Dhu Al-Ghina. The course consisted of five sessions, each lasting two hours, attended by over 60 participants, along with additional viewers who joined the live broadcast on YouTube. The course is now available on YouTube, and all attendees received participation certificates.
5. We created a page called “Organizing Competitions Guide” Members with previous experience in organizing competitions supported the idea, saying the page would be helpful for them as well. Several colleagues, including Mervat, Dr. Walaa, Ahmed Naji, Sandra, Adel, and Du’aa, contributed to discussions that lasted four sessions, during which we discussed everything organizers need to consider before, during, and after a competition. An interesting debate arose over the title of the page, which led to a compromise and the suggestion of creating similar pages.

Other individual and group initiatives, both virtual and in-person, were also included on the 20th Arabic Wikipedia Day page.

This event took seven months of meetings, discussions, email exchanges, and collaborative work with members of the Arab community to organize.

In conclusion, as the organizing team for this special event, we—Donia, Mohammed, and Luma—are deeply grateful to everyone who helped make this event as remarkable as we had hoped. We wish the best of luck to next year’s organizers.