Samuel Klein wrote:
The Library of Alexandria (and Moushira and Abdel
Rahman in particular)
helped organize and host an Arabic Wikipedia day yesterday... if I read
correctly, people contributed roughly 685 new articles in a day, and
4200 this month (increasing the project size by almost 1% in a day! and
6% this month). I looked at a selection from today, and nothing seemed
scripted, /many/ contributors added new articles, including a number of
anons. And it's good to see that the obligations imposed by the heavier
volume is being taken seriously:
http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%86
http://www.bibalex.org/english/media/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsID=2278
I think Khaled Hosny and EGLUG in Cairo helped put on their own
Wikipedia day(s?) earlier in August. There was certainly discussion of
Arabic-language editing drives at Wikimania in Alexandria, but it's
pretty awesome to see it taking place -- barnraisings are a good
spectator sport (and motivation to practice a new language :-).
Congrats to everyone involved, browsing the results made my night.
SJ
(who heard about the event but forgot during the day, and was reminded
by the sitenotice when browsing ar:wp for something quite different...)
That's wonderful news !
Regarding participation from the (by large) area of the world, I spent a
while being bold on the french wikipedia in the past 2-3 days (active
deletionnist) and I was very pleased to note the very serious increase
in articles related to Marrocco. These are not always good ones, lot's
of stuff on small villages, famous sportmen, actresses etc... but this
is a very good sign that Wikipedia is now hosting a significant number
of editors in that country ;-) So, I thought it was very good news.
Ant