Re: arabic wikipedia

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini dot de> wrote:
> 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.

Wow - truly impressive.

> 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!

This really ought to change - I'm not sure we'll find people to do it
full-time, but we sure can find people to consult on issues if that
seems reasonable (until fulltime people can be found).  This call ought
to also make it to Linux4arab and all other Arab open-source avenues.

> 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).

Do please be more specific about issues/problems and we'll look into them
and try to report them to the proper places.

> 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

Most of us are usually on IRC (http://www.arabeyes.org/contact.php) if you
ever need some quicky help (make sure to use a UTF-8 enabled IRC client
like Xchat and/or ChatZilla in case you need to have strings verified or..)

A call to Arabeyes volunteers - are there (yes multiple people) interested
in helping in this effort ?  Are there people interested in writing and/or
consulting about Arabic issues in general that would be willing to say give
an hour a week (or so) to ar.wikipedia.org ?

Elisabeth, if there are issues you need help with or articles written, do
please be specific and I'm sure something will turn up.  Our experience
has shown that it is much better to say "I need an article about the Suez
Canal" instead of "can someone help and volunteer overlook this" with this
crowd.

Salam & thanks.

 - Nadim


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