[Foundation-l] Arabic Wikipedia day(s) -- barnraising joys and results

Sun Aug 31 21:04:05 UTC 2008

Samuel Klein wrote:
> The Library of Alexandria (and Moushira and Abdel Rahman in particular) 
> helped organize and host an Arabic Wikipedia day yesterday... if I read 
> correctly, people contributed roughly 685 new articles in a day, and 
> 4200 this month (increasing the project size by almost 1% in a day! and 
> 6% this month).  I looked at a selection from today, and nothing seemed 
> scripted, /many/ contributors added new articles, including a number of 
> anons.  And it's good to see that the obligations imposed by the heavier 
> volume is being taken seriously:
>    http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%86
>    http://www.bibalex.org/english/media/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsID=2278
> 
> I think Khaled Hosny and EGLUG in Cairo helped put on their own 
> Wikipedia day(s?) earlier in August.  There was certainly discussion of 
> Arabic-language editing drives at Wikimania in Alexandria, but it's 
> pretty awesome to see it taking place -- barnraisings are a good 
> spectator sport (and motivation to practice a new language :-).  
> Congrats to everyone involved, browsing the results made my night.
> 
> SJ
> (who heard about the event but forgot during the day, and was reminded 
> by the sitenotice when browsing ar:wp for something quite different...)

That's wonderful news !

Regarding participation from the (by large) area of the world, I spent a 
  while being bold on the french wikipedia in the past 2-3 days (active 
deletionnist) and I was very pleased to note the very serious increase 
in articles related to Marrocco. These are not always good ones, lot's 
of stuff on small villages, famous sportmen, actresses etc... but this 
is a very good sign that Wikipedia is now hosting a significant number 
of editors in that country ;-) So, I thought it was very good news.

Ant