This weekend, I am in Alexandria again.  This time, I am here for Wikimania 2008 — this is the fourth annual conference for the Wikimedia Foundation, its projects, and other wiki projects.

Now that I am studying Arabic, I am particularly interested in the Arabic Wikipedia.  The English Wikipedia is enormous with over 2 million articles — most of them of decent length and varying quality.  On the other hand, the Arabic Wikipedia has approximately 65,000 articles.  There are versions of Wikipedia in over 200 languages.  While Arabic is one of the top five languages by number of speakers, it is ranked #30 in terms of number of articles.

Certainly demographic and social factors are important towards explaining why the Arabic Wikipedia has progressed so much slower.  Another reason I think is important is the situation of diglossia, which is where the spoken language that people learn as children differs from the standard, written language.  Beyond that, people in many Arab countries also learn English at a young age.  When people get to the age and level of education to be in the key demographic where they are most likely to contribute to Wikipedia, those people are often equally capable of contributing in English and Arabic.  Many choose to contribute in English.  Contributions to the Arabic Wikipedia come mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan.  Other Arab countries including Morocco and Lebanon have much smaller numbers of contributors to the Arabic Wikipedia, while they do have more contributors to the English Wikipedia.

I am interested in studying this further.  There is a wealth of data available within Wikipedia which can be analyzed to help answer questions.

At Wikimania, I signed up to talk about this and gave a second talk. My presentations are posted here:

• Progress of the Arabic Wikipedia  slides
• Abstract and some details (arwiki)
• DC MapGuide (other talk) - slides
  

Both are very much works in progress.  Especially the analysis of the Arabic Wikipedia contributions vs. English.  I need to run the analysis with more data and explore the data further, as well as conduct more literature review about possible demographic and social factors that are also important.

Wikipedia is a very useful tool for studying and learning a new language. The English Wikipedia is very well known, with over 2 million articles. But, it is important to know there are versions of Wikipedia in 253 other languages, ranging from major languages such as German to other languages not spoken as widely, such as Wolof (spoken in Senegal). The Arabic language Wikipedia currently has 45 483 articles, so is still relatively small and growing.
The software (MediaWiki) that runs all the different Wikipedia sites is the same, along with consistencies in how other aspects of the sites are set-up. Articles and pages usually have links to the same articles or pages in other languages. This helps if you want to know how a word is said in another language. One feature of Wikipedia sites is the use of templates, which denote article maintenance tasks needed for articles, or other things. Many of these templates have been translated into other languages.
In reviewing vocabulary words, I came across one such template on Wikipedia:

Source: Arabic Wikipedia (licensed under GFDL)
This template is used by Wikipedia users to let others know they are busy and will not available (much or at all) on Wikipedia, for some time period.

Source: English Wikipedia (licensed under GFDL)
The key part of this is: هذا المستخدم مشغول
هذا - (hatha) - this
المستخدم (al mustkhadam) user
مشغول - (mashrul) busy
In Arabic, there is no “to be” verb. So, put together the words “this” + “user” + “busy” and that translates as “this user is busy”.