2019:Languages/Wikimedia and Arabic Sociolinguistics

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Languages/Wikimedia and Arabic Sociolinguistics

Description

Considered as the main languages in Middle East and North Africa, Arabic languages can be useful to spread knowledge and ameliorate overall literacy across this region. That is why Arabic Wikipedia was founded on July 9, 2003 and Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was created on November 24, 2008. Although that these two wikis have succeeded to achieve several milestones, they failed to cover all aspects of human knowledge and to become the major method of spreading scientific information in several Arab countries due to the important complexity of the current language situation of the Arab world. In this lecture, I will explain the development of the language situation of the Arab world from an historical point of view to identify the matters related to the use of Arabic languages to spread knowledge using Wikipedia and sister projects. Then, I will prove how these problems significantly limited the influence and evolution of Arabic wikis using Statistical analysis. Finally, I will summarize and discuss possible solutions for these matters based on Wikidata and Applied Linguistics.

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

This lecture is mainly related to providing quality education to the Arab world. Effectively, many papers proved that providing knowledge in the mother tongue of a country can help enhancing its literacy rate. Particularly, it has been found that providing knowledge in Arabic languages can help ameliorating the education quality of Arab countries. A reference paper about this topic is Language Education and Human Development: Arabic Diglossia and Its Impact on the Quality of Education in the Arab Region of Professor Mohamed Maamouri.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

Attendees will learn about the language situation of the Arab world and its influence on the situation of Arabic Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in Arabic languages including test wikis in Incubator.
Attendees will have an overview about the Wikimedia-related matters caused by the language situation of the Arab world and ways to solve them.
Attendees will learn how Wikidata can be used to support languages and mainly Arabic ones.

Session leader(s)

Houcemeddine Turki, Wikimedia TN User Group and WikiLingua Maghreb
Anass Sedrati, Wikimedia MA User Group and WikiLingua Maghreb (For Q&A)

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

Lightning talk

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

Room:

A lecture hall, a projector + screen.

Audience:

Can be provided to 100 people, No specific skills required.

Recording:

Possible and needed to spread the outcomes of this Wikimania session.