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Re: arabic wikipedia

Nadim Shaikli wrote:

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).

The fine thing about Wikipedia is that everybody decides for himself how much time he devotes to his work there: Some people work there night and day, some an evening a week, some just donate some texts they've written.

This call ought to also make it to Linux4arab and all other Arab open-source avenues.

It would be wonderful if you can tell all these people about it. I wrote to Arabeyes, because you people here know Open Source and wiki.

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.

Most important issue: In the wikipedia wiki software you create links by adding double brackets like [[this]] to a word. In the arabic wikipedia with Mozilla it's terribly difficult to do this: you first have to type the closing brackets, then the word and the opening brackets (at the moment I type in a text editor first and then copy text over in the edit box).

But I am not sure, if this is a bug, because the people on the hebrew wikipedia seem to be able to edit without problems.

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..)

Shukran kathiran for the offer :-) BTW, the wikipedia channels are also on freenode.net - on #wikipedia (and on #enrc.wikipedia one can watch the english wikipedia growing in real time)

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 ?

That would be great :-)

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.

Unfortunately I can't do that. Later the time comes, when people say "we need an article about the Suez Canal" and look out for someone who will write it. But it's not the way a wiki encyclopedia works in the beginning. That is, what the arabic wikipedia needs at the moment, are just people who have fun to write encyclopedia articles about subjects they know and like. It can be anything, from computer topics to history, arts, music - whatever you like and think an encyclopedia should contain.

I came to the German wikipedia one and a half year ago when it had about 1000 badly written articles (now it's 50000). Some people were very frustrated about how much was missing and forced themselves to write about things just to have an article about it. But this will resolve sooner or later anyway - most important is to start writing, to build up a community.

Salaam,
elian