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Re: arabic wikipedia

Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:

When it comes to translations, our focus should always be on
localization of linux/unix applications and systems, not generic
websites. By no means am I belittling the effort at wikipedia, I think
it is a tremendous and amazing amount of work. All I am saying is, the
'Arabization' of its content should come from a group other than
Arabeyes.

There seems to be a misunderstanding: it's not a translation work. Oh, you _can_ translate an article from the english wikipedia to arabic, if you like. But most articles in the different languages are written independently (just translating would be a bit boring), so that you have totally different articles about the same topic in each language wikipedia.

To re-iterate, Arabeyes' goals are not to localize all Open Source
content (be it inside an application or on the web). It is to Arabize
Linux/Unix systems (and its accompanying applications, libraries and
utilities). I would rather we do not deviate from this. As we all know,
we are short-handed, so sticking to our original mandate would do us
more good than springing into every other 'translation' gig we find
needed.

It's not my intention to distract the arabeyes people from their programming and translation work. You do a very valuable task, which needs to be done. But you can help us to attract the right people to the arabic wikipedia, arabic linux users or other people, who can't program, but want to contribute their share to the open source world. Who understand that software and knowledge need to be free and everyone should be able to freely copy and distribute it. For example a link to the arabic wikipedia in the link section of the arabeyes website would help us very much.

What the arabeyes project can do further with the arabic wikipedia, if they want, is using the wikipedia to provide reference information about Linux, Unix and Open Source in Arabic such as it is done in English on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

Single articles which can be printed out and distributed on Linux events and so on...
But that's completely up to you, it's just one possible use arabeyes can make of an arabic encyclopedia.

kind regards,
elian