Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia

History

The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was proposed on 30 March 2008 and started as a developing project on 2 April 2008 in the Wikimedia Incubator. A Wikipedian with the username Ghaly was the founder of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia. Dr. Ivan Panović, the author of "The Beginnings of Wikipedia Masry," described Ghaly as the spiritus movens of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia. Florence Devouard, the former president of the Wikimedia Foundation, stated that the foundation wanted Wikipedians to participate in their native languages.

The proposal was accepted in July 2008, and the announcement was made on the first day of Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria. On 24 November 2008, the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was officially launched, and the Incubator articles were transferred to the new domain.

In 2009, the Wikipedia had 4,000 articles, and Wikipedians participating came from within and outside Egypt. By 2010 the Masry Wikipedia had almost 6,000 articles. That year, Panović wrote that "The number of active contributors is still rather small, yet their entries seem to be growing." At the time many of the articles were very short articles, or "stubs". Panović wrote that editors of the Masry Wikipedia had a tendency of creating new articles "just for the sake of increasing their number in hopes of expanding them later."

Origin

The origin of the proposal for the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia is based on the active interest of some Egyptian Wikipedians in contributing articles, especially on the Arabic Wikipedia, as they constitute large group of the serious contributors in that Wikipedia.

The idea behind the creation of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia is to have an encyclopaedia that is written in the language that Egyptians use in their everyday lives. It is hoped this will be much easier for Egyptians to read and encourage more Egyptians to contribute to Wikipedia.

Panović stated that "it is clear that Masry Wikipedians are the proponents of Egyptian territorial nationalism of a kind that sets itself apart from Arab or Islamic nationalisms, seeking to carve out a specifically Egyptian identity" and he argued that therefore there was an "ease" in which the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedians "seem to embrace and promote some radical and even erroneous ideas about language." Ghaly is a Christian, and Panović stated that "judging by their contributions and/or user pages" several of those involved are also Christian; Panović stated that minority groups tend to be more active in identity politics.

Development

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) classification of Egyptian Arabic under the language code arz is one of the arguments used by Egyptian Arabic Wikipedians for considering Masry an independent language. The project uses the Cairene-style Egyptian Arabic.

Ghaly, in the Wikimedia Foundation proposal page for the Egyptian Wikipedia, stated that his view of the Masry Wikipedia was that it would be "written in layperson terms and a mixture between Egyptian slang and simple Arabic", conveying "the information to speakers of Egyptian Arabic in a way similar to what Wikipedia Simple English is doing currently in comparison to Wikipedia English." In response some Wikipedians criticised the proposal stating that it would be a Simple Arabic Wikipedia. Ghaly responded, arguing that he did not intend to actually start a simple Arabic Wikipedia.

As of October 2013, the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia has over 11,000 articles, and continues to grow. In addition there is a project to develop an Egyptian Arabic Wiktionary, which is in the development phase as a project on Wikimedia incubator.

Reaction

The Egyptian variant of Wikipedia was controversially received; supporters pointed to the number of Wikipedias written in regional languages and argued that Egyptian Arabic was a widely spoken variant of Arabic, while opponents perceived the creation of the Egyptian language Wikipedia as an attack on the Arabic Wikipedia and argued that Standard Arabic was the standard language for media, and the use of a regional language version was anachronistic.

The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia has been subject to controversy from the start, causing arguments between supporters and opponents. There have been lengthy discussions before the approval of the proposal. Also, there were discussions on other websites apart from meta.Wikimedia. This was also based on the differences in definition of a language and a dialect. This is a result of diglossia in Egypt, where the written language is a different dialect than the language used daily, which is not frequently written, although a certain amount of literature (particularly plays and poetry) exists written in the Egyptian dialect in Egypt.

Support

The proposal has been supported by many users and gained the approval of the language committee on Wikimedia. The wiki has less than 5 active editors who did lead to an increase in the number of articles.

Amira Samir of the Al-Ahram Hebdo reported that some Egyptians on the internet did not have a problem with the project, arguing that the Wikimedia Foundation was an independent body and therefore the Egyptian government could not force the inclusion or exclusion of any particular dialect.

Opposition

Discussions and criticism has occurred in some Facebook groups and several blogs and forums. Samir stated that many online users believed that the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was an attack on the Arabic language. The primary criticism of the Wikipedia Masry involves the belied that a "degradation" of Arabic occurred when someone writes in a dialect. Panović argues that the criticism is "grounded in folk belief about language" and therefore it is a "futile task" to examine the arguments from a linguistic point of view. According to Panović, many of the critics took note that many involved with the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia were Christian and that they perceived the project to be antagonistic against the Arab identity and Islam. Panović wrote that "It almost goes without saying there are also those who see in Wikipedia Masry yet another Jewish plot." According to Samir, some critics argued that the Egyptian Arabic language has a lack of rules and variations of meanings in words, and so it is an unsuitable language for an encyclopedia.

Opposition to this version of Wikipedia has been strong during the proposal stage; opposition continued after the project officially launched including campaigns on Facebook. Some of these campaigns encouraged users to vandalize the Egyptian Wikipedia. The main point which the opposition focuses on is that Egyptian Arabic is not a language, suggesting that the effort should be directed to development of Arabic Wikipedia. The effectiveness of these campaigns remains to be seen, as the Wikipedia articles are still being developed and number of users is increasing.