Activating Participation in the Arabic Wikipedia is the Core of the Third Day Discussions in the Wikimania Conference
Posted on
Alexandria—
The third day of the 4th Wikimania Annual Conference held at the BA from 17 to 19 July witnessed a number of discussions between participants. Participants discussed how to activate and expand the Arabic Wikipedia, which comprises of about 65,000 articles, in comparison to the English Wikipedia which contains about 2.5 million articles, and the Polish Wikipedia of 500,000 articles.
The Egyptian blogger Alaa Seif-El-Islam stated that the Arabic Wikipedia is way behind in comparison to its counterparts in other languages, given the large number of Arabic speakers worldwide. He added that the problem lies not only in the limited number of articles written in the Arabic Wikipedia, but also in the limited number of participants in editing, which in turn affects the quality of articles available and the overall effectiveness of the website. Seif -El-Islam believes that the reason behind the success of blogging in the Arab World is young people’s awareness of the importance of participation in political life.
On his part, Tim Spalding, the founder of librarything.com gave a lecture, in which he explained the features of his website that allow a user to create a whole catalogue of his personal library and share it with all other members of the website and thus, makes books a means of social interaction. Spalding mentioned that the website is free of charge until the user’s catalogue reaches a hundred books, which then becomes for fees, and the user has the freedom to choose the amount of money he/she wants to pay.
In a session entitled: ‘Beyond Encyclopedias’, Angela Beesley and Jimmy Wales talk about the ‘Wikia’ website, which Wales founded as a free website hosting wiki websites away from the framework of the encyclopedia, which limits the quality of permitted content on it and the projects related to it. Wales presented the last of the Wikia Projects; Wikia Search, a search engine relying on the contributions of volunteers, exactly like the Wikipedia. Wales mentioned 4 principles of this search engine; transparency, cooperation, quality, and privacy.
The conference witnessed some side discussions and arguments on “open source programs”, and as Ossama Fayyad, Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer for Research and Strategic Solutions, expressed his support to such programs, he nevertheless, answered a question by a wikimeda contributor, saying that it is difficult for Yahoo! to make available its programs free of charge, while spending almost 3 billion dollars a year on developing them.