Forwarding message to the Arabic community list, as per the request to get in touch with people growing the Arabic Wikipedia in terms of content or community. See full message below.

Original senders CC'd.

-- Tighe Flanagan Manager, Wikipedia Education Program Wikimedia Foundation tflanagan@wikimedia.org education.wikimedia.org

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mike Linksvayer ml@gondwanaland.com Date: Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 1:49 PM Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Arabic Wikipedia research-driven improvement & Bassel To: Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Jon Phillips jon@fabricatorz.com

Hi, you may have read https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/10/08/bassel-missing-syria/ about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassel_Khartabil and focusing on one of his projects, building free 3D models of Palmyra, before he was detained. Bassel also did outreach for free/open projects throughout the region and dreamed of projects to increase the number and quality of articles on Arabic Wikipedia. But he is in prison, now taken to an unknown location. :(

Bassel's friend and advocate Jon Phillips (not on this list but cc'd) is looking to talk to people who are actually engaged in efforts to grow the Arabic Wikipedia community and articles, I believe in order to show the kind of work Bassel would have been doing and that the world has lost, and to be supportive of others carrying on that work.

If anyone has such contacts who would be willing to talk to Jon, feel free to reply on- or offlist as appropriate.

This seemed to be the most appropriate list for me to ask on because it is one of a few wikimedia ones that I'm on :) and because I figure that best such efforts will be paired with research. I did look at http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects -- I see lots of papers doing some kind of semantic analysis of Arabic Wikipedia, one study of the Arab spring http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Collective_memory_building_in_Wikipedia:... and a master's thesis that seems to be unavailable http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Motivational_voluntary_knowledge_sharing... -- the best lead might be https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mapping_Wikipedia_in_the_Middle_Eas... which looks broad but potentially very relevant. Have I missed anything obvious, or non-obvious because too new/ongoing?

...

Another question, mostly out of (idle, but this seems like a good time to ask) personal curiosity: is there a line of research about movements that looks at responses to movement members in distress, perhaps in order to characterize level of solidarity, maturity, or some other feature of movement, or to map connections between movements? Or concerning how vulnerable movement members are to various forms of persecution, perhaps in order to characterize where movement operates with regard to law and norms of society? I figure there must be but my super naive searches haven't turned up anything.

I'm curious because I wonder how free/libre/open/wiki movements compare to other movements and member vulnerability/responses to member distress seem like a potential thing to compare, and I notice how Bassel, who had 'weak ties' to a whole bunch of open movements (and 'strong ties' to Creative Commons) has gotten a fair amount of support from ... a whole bunch (which is good of course).

Thanks for reading. Mike

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