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.
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