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_Mult…).
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
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