User:Shadyloo/Arabic Wikipedia Initiative

Motivation
Wikimedia's mission of developing, maintaining and providing human knowledge to the public is an ever-growing process. The wealth of human knowledge has no limit, and in order for Wikipedia to be able to cope with this, more and more contributors must engage in the publication process. Attracting and encouraging Wikipedia contributors is an integral part of Wikimedia's mission. This is in particular evident in the case of the Arabic Wikipedia. To illustrate this, consider the English Wikipedia corpus which contains over 3 million articles, followed by the German and French ones with over 1 million articles each. On the other hand, the Arabic Wikipedia consists of a little over 156 thousand articles. Given that Arabic is the fourth most-spoken language in the world, with about 206 million native speakers which is not very far off from English, which is spoken by about 328 million speakers, it is evident that there is a lack of contributors and hence contents in Arabic.

Challenges
The above obvious lack of correlation between the sizes of the different Wikipedia corpora and the number of speakers of the corpora's languages can be contributed to various factors. These factors include the variance in Internet usability among the speakers of different languages. For instance, the number of Internet users are dominated by the English speakers, with French and German both in the top 10 languages on the Internet in terms of users. However, Arabic is also among the top 10 languages which indicates that this is not the only decisive factor. In addition to Internet usability, the nature of content generated in different languages vary. For instance, as a native Arabic speaker, I observed that the majority of the Arabic content on the Web are dominated by forums, blogs and social media. High quality knowledge represents a very small fraction of the Arabic content on the Web. This is mainly due to cultural aspects, where the concept of sharing knowledge is still by large non-existent, and the Internet is perceived mainly as a platform for enjoying free time, sharing personal thoughts or issues and recently as a platform for political activism. Increasing the popularity of knowledge-sharing platforms in Arabic-speaking areas has the potential of boosting this fraction of high quality knowledge by a big factor. This however requires considerable efforts to introduce Wikipedia's mission on a broad range and to motivate users in the Arabic region to contribute to Wikipedia which entails also familiarizing them with Wiki-style editing.

Encouraging Contributors
To be able to overcome the aforementioned issues, the first step is to increase the awareness of Wikipedia in the Arabic community. This can be carried out using educational campaigns on social networks where there is already a big community of active Arabic-speaking users. This campaign should try to attract new contributors by explaining the Wikimedia mission and how each one can make a difference by contributing. It should also focus on how contributing can be awarding and fun at the same time and also how their individual contributions matter.

Another very natural starting point to enhance the Wikipedia contribution in the Arabic community is a classroom environment. This is the essence of the global education program of Wikimedia. To encourage students and teachers to contribute to the global education program many strategies could be followed. The first and foremost approach to achieve this goal is to motivate the teachers to participate in the program. Apart from the moral fulfillment of contributing to the wealth of knowledge and providing a reputable reference for scholars, Wikipedia provides teachers with a widely-viewed domain where they can document their knowledge and expertise. In addition, Wikipedia articles published as a part of a class can serve as a point of reference for future students and for the teachers themselves. Apart from scholarly reasons, acknowledging contributors to the program by Wikimedia can further motivate the teachers to participate in the program. Moreover, organizing events where contributors can attend to share success stories and exchange experiences and providing benefits to contributors such as subscriptions to scientific journals, awards, and so on can also be a very successful strategy to increase the participation in the program.

To encourage students to contribute to the program by publishing and editing Wikipedia articles, the editing process itself can be a mandatory activity in the classroom. In order to ensure high-quality content and at the same time an incentive to contribute, a competitive approach can be adapted. Again, awarding best contributors either with bonus points, or moral and physical awards can play a big role in increasing the participation rate and quality. Finally, providing necessary training for both students and teachers is a very important aspect that guarantees that the contribution to Wikipedia and the participation in the project is a fun, easy and fulfilling activity rather than a burden.

Collaborating with other non-governmental organizations such as public libraries, research centers and graduate schools can further increase the contribution rate and can moreover widen the scope of the contents contributed. In addition, gathering funds to support the Wikimedia mission from various entities in the Arabic World is also an important task that must be tackled in order to be able to provide the necessary trainings, hire ambassadors, award best contributors and increase usability. I believe that Wikipedia has a big potential to very quickly bring order to the Arabic Web and to become the most comprehensive Web-style encyclopedia in these regions.

Ideas to Enhance user experience on the Arabic Wikipedia
There are already many extensions for Mediawiki and many of them are applicable for the case of the Arabic Wikipedia. There are also endless number of ideas that one can think of to enhance the user experience on Wikipedia whether during reading or editing. The following list focuses on the latter and by no means is meant to be exhaustive. One interesting remark is that it is not very easy to find out which Mediawiki extensions are available in Arabic.

Article Style Importing
For example, when adding an article about a country or a movie, an editor can select an example article and then the extension would automatically create a replica of the article removing all contents but keeping relevant templates such as the infobox for example (after resetting its parameters). Moreover, it can leave examples to essential components such as a category entry, a reference entry and so on.

Inline Search
An extension where a user can simply highlight a text, and it searches either Wikipedia for that text or the Web.

Translation
An automatic translator that translates both contents as well as metadata (like a template for instance).

Multilingual Search
Allow cross-language search for articles and multimedia and combine with translation tool.

Categories Suggestion
Use the article text to suggest relevant categories (using clustering techniques for instance).

Exporting from Other Formats
Export content from local documents in formats the users are more familiar with such as Word documents, PDF files, etc and automatically convert them into Wikitext.

Tutorials and Walkthroughs
Adding proper tutorials and walkthroughs in the form of books for creating different types of articles, with examples about real articles with different complexities. Moreover, give an easy way to browse available templates and extensions.

User Specific Recommendations
Suggest relevant content for user to read, edit or suggest topics to be added based on user preferences, behavior (such as what she edits, what she reads, etc). This will be more effective than having one initiative for all types of users.

Inline Editing
Allow users to edit text directly without having to deal with the Wikitext itself which might look too frightening to casual users. For example, users can have the option to just modify the text or information in an Infobox without having to deal with any markup.

Punctuation
Add a punctuation (tashkeel) toolkit for Arabic poetry, Quran verses, etc.

Mentoring
Add chat capabilities and ways for users to interact and ask for help from felow editors.

Customizing User Interface
Allowing users to customize their user interface to use a language of preference (not necessarily Arabic) might be useful to encourage Arabic speaking users who prefer to use a non-Arabic language for navigation. This also includes editing features, templates, etc.