I'm really not sure that creating a project in an Arabic dialect requires the blessing of the Board. I'm not aware of any written document that makes Arabic varieties special with regard to approving a new project, since the same Language committee policies apply to it:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy

The policy of adding languages to Wikidata is not the same, however. To be honest, I don't know it very well, but I'm pretty sure that it also doesn't have any special provisions for Arabic varieties.

בתאריך יום א׳, 21 באפר׳ 2019, 23:17, מאת Houcemeddine A. Turki ‏<turkiabdelwaheb@hotmail.fr>:

Dear Mr.,

I thank you for your answer. This is just what I meant. If Wikidata supports Arabic dialects, there will be no need to create tens of Wikipedias and Wiktionaries.

Yours Sincerely,

Houcemeddine Turki (he/him)

Medical Student, Faculty of Medicine of Sfax, University of Sfax, Tunisia

Undergraduate Researcher, UR12SP36

GLAM and Education Coordinator, Wikimedia TN User Group

Member, WikiResearch Tunisia

Member, Wiki Project Med

Member, WikiIndaba Steering Committee

Member, Wikimedia and Library User Group Steering Committee

Co-Founder, WikiLingua Maghreb

Founder, TunSci

____________________

+21629499418

-------- Message d'origine --------
De : Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
Date : 2019/04/21 16:18 (GMT+01:00)
À : Discussion list for the Wikidata project <wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org>
Objet : Re: [Wikidata] Wikidata and Arabic dialects

Hoi,

All Arabic languages are in principle eligible for localisation in translatewiki.net. At the time, the WMF board was not all too pleased with an Egyptian Wikipedia. Having said that, localisation is not a problem from a language committee position. Having new projects in Arabic family languages requires the blessing of the board.

Thanks,

     GerardM

On Sun, 21 Apr 2019 at 16:05, Houcemeddine A. Turki <turkiabdelwaheb@hotmail.fr> wrote:

Dear all,

I thank you for your efforts. It was a long time since I began working on the issue of Arabic dialects in wikis. This issue is complicated as it has many significant sides such as the linguistic side and the sociopolitical side. In 2008, Language Committee approved the creation of Egyptian Wikipedia. Nowadays, many of the articles of this Wikipedia are written in Modern Standard Arabic and not in Egyptian Arabic. Moreover, most of the articles written in Egyptian Wikipedia are stubs. This can be explained by the difficulty of writing Egyptian and finding technical terms in this language as well as many other Arabic dialects due to the lack of standardization. In 2017, I proposed in AICCSA 2017 conference (ERA C Class Conference) the that Wikidata can be used a knowledgebase for Arabic dialects (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321039195_Using_WikiData_as_a_Multi-lingual_Multi-dialectal_Dictionary_for_Arabic_Dialects). In fact, we can be simply done by adding labels in Arabic dialects to all Wikidata entities and we will not face the matters faced by active Egyptian Wikipedia editors as we do not need to formulate statements into sentences to put them in Wikidata. Furthermore, the database can be useful for a variety of other important tasks such as Named Entity Recognition. All what we should do is to translate Mediawiki system messages to Arabic dialects and add labels, descriptions and aliases in Arabic dialects. Since 2017, I worked to add support to Tunisian Arabic in Wikidata so that I can convince users of the accuracy of this solution. As you can know, Tunisian is represented in Mediawiki with three language codes: aeb, aeb-arab (Arabic Script) and aeb-latn (Latin Script: Arabizi). I added labels, descriptions and aliases in aeb-arab and aeb-latn. However, aeb remained without labels. I ask if you can add a module to Wikidata that adds any label, description or alias of aeb-arab to aeb. I also ask about your opinions about this Wikidata project.

Yours Sincerely,

Houcemeddine Turki (he/him)

Medical Student, Faculty of Medicine of Sfax, University of Sfax, Tunisia

Undergraduate Researcher, UR12SP36

GLAM and Education Coordinator, Wikimedia TN User Group

Member, WikiResearch Tunisia

Member, Wiki Project Med

Member, WikiIndaba Steering Committee

Member, Wikimedia and Library User Group Steering Committee

Co-Founder, WikiLingua Maghreb

Founder, TunSci

____________________

+21629499418

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