Wikimedia Levant arr­anged to start teach­ing Wikipedia materi­al as a chapter in an IT co­urse for first year students in the Univ­ersity of Jordan. 18k students :)

Pushing 18k students directly to Wikipe­dia will lead a cert­ain IP Range blocks by the admin­s, as they can hardly keep up with vanda­lism. Certainly they will not have the time to take care of all these students mistakes and destru­ction expected at the beginning.

We rented a server in Germany, to insta­ll a copy of mediawi­ki and have Arabic, English, Ja­paneses, Russian and other dumps of Wiki­pedia. This will provide a buff­er, and safe environ­ment for the students to work, destroy and learn.

As a start, we are having problems inst­alling Arabic Wikipe­dia. We used the latest dump, but for some reason, not all artic­le where reflected on the si­te. example (Jordan Art­icle) is missing : http://ar.wikimedial%C2%ADevant.org/index.php?%C2%ADtitle=%D8%A7%D9%84%D%C2%...

Plus, almost all pa­ges have errors (cou­ld be due to use of Arabic ParserFunctions) example: http://ar.wikimedial%C2%ADevant.org/index.php?%C2%ADtitle=%D9%86%D9%87%D%C2%...

And, of course the main problem is havi­ng different languag­es. We have no idea how to add more than languages on the servers :(

The users from Arab­ic Wikipedia, and Wi­kimedia Levant commu­nity will help running the se­rvers as Local Admin­s.

Any help installing the servers is appr­eciated. Actually we are begging here :S

Thanks for all

Dr. Rami Tarawneh user:tarawneh