arabic wikipedia

[Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini dot de>]

Hello,

It has been mentioned already on this list some while ago: at 
http://ar.wikipedia.org an open content encyclopedia in arabic waits to 
be born.

It's part of the international project wikipedia, an encyclopedia with 
now almost 500 000 articles in more than 40 languages, written entirely 
by volunteers. Its content is licensed under the GNU free documentation 
license.

Currently there are several unsolved things, and I hope that maybe 
someone here on the list can help:

First, there are no arabs in the arabic wikipedia, only some people from 
the other projects willing to help with technical questions about the 
wiki, but they don't speak much arabic (I am a project member of the 
German wikipedia and quite interested in arabic culture, but my arabic 
is... better don't speak about it). So, if you have friends with 
internet access who might enjoy working together in building the biggest 
free resource of knowledge in the web, tell them about it!

I tried to localize parts of the interface (many thanks for the wordlist 
:-))), but I am sure there are many mistakes and a good deal remains to 
be translated (btw, the software, mediawiki, is GPL and can be used for 
other wikis as well).

Second problem is the name - something which is quite difficult to 
change afterwards if it turns out to be wrong. Currently ويكيبيديا
is used. Is this correct? (Someone made already a logo 
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_other_languages)

Third are browser problems with Mozilla and Firebird which behave quite 
strangely with arabic in the textboxes (at least on my systems). I don't 
know much about how it should behave correctly, since I don't type much 
in arabic, so we were absolutely grateful for good, developer style bug 
reports (and hints how to fix the problems).

If you have any questions, please ask, here on the list, by mail or on 
my talk page at http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Elian

kind regards,
Elian