Web users shunning Arabic Wikipedia

By Vineetha Menon on Thursday, July 24, 2008 Arabic Internet users are shunning the Arabic-language version of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, according to speakers at the Wikipedia conference. The annual Wikipedia conference, Wikimania, was held at the Bibliotheca Alexandria, in Egypt last week. While hosting the conference was seen as a big boost to Arabic and African Wikimedia, one of the hot topics of discussion was the low uptake of Wikipedia in Arabic. The English version of Wikipedia now boasts over two and a half million articles, compared to just over 65,000 in Arabic. Among all the different language Wikipedias, Arabic has a rank of 29, just above Serbian and Slovenian. The lack of Arabic contributions was attributed to a number of reasons, including greater familiarity with English as an online language for... [read full story]