User:Mohamed Abdel Mageed

Welcome to my user page on Wikipedia!

My name is Mohamed Abdel-Mageed; I am a Wikipedian since 2005.

Currently, I am a Business Administration student. My native language is Arabic, and my native dialect is Egyptian. I can speak English on a near-native level, which is my preferred language of contribution on Wikipedia. I am also knowledgeable of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic.

Usually, I do not edit Wikipedia’s articles because I do not consider myself knowledgeable enough to do such a task. I believe that editing Wikipedia should only be limited to people who have enough experience, knowledge, and resources to contribute. Nevertheless, I occasionally remove vandalism and inclusion of false (i.e. improperly sourced and illogical) information. Whenever I do this, I do a lot of research to make sure that I did not remove information that might be correct and to make sure the information I am contributing (if any), is correct. Wikipedia’s strong prevalence on the internet and its position as the primary global source of information nowadays is something that needs to be dealt with very carefully. One wrong fact on Wikipedia may misinform thousands of people in less than a couple of hours, giving the possibility of very fast propagation of false information. I am sure many people (myself included) use Wikipedia as their primary source of information, making such a threat very real.

This is where Wikipedia’s dormant users come in handy. Those users help everyone whenever they find wrong information on Wikipedia and at the same time never contribute anything outside of their limits of knowledge and expertise.

About the Egyptian Dialect Wikipedia (Wikipedia Masri):

I vehemently oppose this Wikipedia and I believe it is one of the more useless, if not harmful, Wikipedias on the web. There are plenty of reasons for this opinion:

Firstly, as an Egyptian citizen, I can tell from firsthand experience that most of the written publications released around the country are released in Modern Standard Arabic. It is indeed a rare sight to see a publication in Egyptian Arabic. In its native country, publications written in Egyptian Arabic on billboards, advertisements, or cheap pulp magazines are a rare sight. As a matter of fact, school text books, newspapers, college material, pamphlets, instruction manuals, receipts, business transactions, movie and television subtitles, even comic books (such as Mickey Mouse and Friends, in Egypt called Mickey Magazine), and erotic ones are written in MSA Arabic, to name a few.

Secondly, it is also worthy to note that the Egyptian Wikipedia diverts some of the editing attention from the Arabic Wikipedia, which is supposed to be the canonical version of Wikipedia in the Arabic speaking world. As a result, whenever I am looking for an Arabic topic, I have to check it on two Wikipedias instead of just one since missing information from the Arabic Wikipedia could be found on its Egyptian counterpart and vice versa. Looking for information on two Wikipedias instead of just one is very time-consuming and often confusing thing do since sometimes both Wikipedias negate each other. Not to mention the share of problems the Arabic Wikipedia is suffering from, such as the low amount of contributions, inaccuracy, and lack of objectivity.

Thirdly, Egyptian Arabic is a dialect, and not a language. I do not see the point of adding a phonetic lingual derivative to a text-based encyclopedia! If this is a case like the Norwegian language’s condition of Nynorsk and Bokmål, where both are considered languages, then it is only reasonable to include two Wikipedias for both languages since each is used in school text books in their respective regions. This is clearly not the case with the Egyptian Wikipedia, even though one may argue that a by-the-definition Egyptian Wikipedia should be in the Coptic language.

In my opinion, it is not practical to include another Wikipedia that could increase the Arabic Wikipedia’s share of problems and decrease its share of contributions and viewership. That Wikipedia already suffers many problems; it is laden with personal opinions, weasel words, and plenty of other stylistic and informational errors in its structure. If it were not for the majority of its truly dedicated editors, the Arabic Wikipedia would not have been even readable and I commend them for their great work. --Mohamed 11:36, 25 April 2012 (UTC)