User:Melamrawy (WMF)/sandbox/outreach

The number of active Wikipedians on Arabic Wikipedia throughout 2011 has ranged between 400 and 665 with an average of 464 Wikipedians

Arabic Wikipedia Outreach Approach

For the short-term, our outreach for Arabic Wikipedia focuses on 3 aspect:

Scanning the current community of existing editors and possible outreach activities in different geographies

Arabic Wikipedia edits per country breakdown

Casual observation suggest that the number of active editors in each Arabic speaking country is a number that ranges between 3-7 Wikipedians in the best cases. Mostly, Wikipedians who are residents of the same country/city don't meet to foster efforts to reaching out to potential community of new Wikipedia contributors. Our visits aim at keeping strong bonds with the existing community of Wikipedias, help Wikipedians themselves meet, help Wikipedians engage with like-minded communities or groups (FOSS, CC, Mozilla, etc.) that can support on-ground outreach activities and thus sustain an active node of local Wikipedians in their countries.

Our criteria for potential geographies depends on a number of factors:

• A considerable percentage of internet penetration with a good representation of current existing local Wikipedia community that contributes to Arabic Wikiepdia;
• Being a socially accessible country, with no political or security constrains that can form a threat to the local community and visiting staff and volunteers;
• A future potential of sustaining outreach activities on the short term, or extending different activities in those geographies, such as operating the Wikipedia education program and other future schemes;

Our countries of focus, for the next 6 months are: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia. Check the regional visits below for more details on outlined schedule.

GLAM activities

• Libraries: Reaching out to libraries, in order to help release the current content of old books that aren't currently subject to copyright violation. Digitization move has been active for Arabic books in the last 10 years, however, the vague laws of copyrights in most countries, make it difficult to decide on the status of old books. The recent digitized content faces the challenge of both copyrights violation, as well as OCRing issues, which makes text processing not fully functional. Major national libraries in each country is usually a hub for activities, a thing which can support hosting events by local communities. Other ideas for libraries partnerships, include Wikipedia booths, unifying a search system that makes Wikipedia home page and main search page, for all in house computers, advertising to Wikipedia in libraries'own outreach material, starting Wikipedia clubs in libraries, and many more..

• Museums: Despite of the ancient history associated with Arabic speaking geographies, however, the presence of digitized collection for major museums isn't always available. In addition, the release of digitized ancient materials such as manuscripts, is not always valid. Outreach to museums, focuses on the relatively newer museums, mostly located in Gulf areas, with possible digitized content that could be realsed, in addition to collaboration with the museum for hosting possible WP events as part of their existing agenda.

Reaching out to like-minded institutions and communities

• FOSS community are a natural supporter of Wikipedia. In 2007 the first Wikipedia Arabic day, was initiatived and organized on the ground by member of Egypt Linux community, who aren't regular editors themselves. The number of FOSS community is usually larger than the number of Wikipedians in a given country, therefor helping foster the relationships between local Wikiepdians and their peer FOSS enthusiasts helps with supporting events offline. Similarly, Creative Commons, Mozilla, hackerspaces, are all supporters of Wikipedia mission, and advoctaed of free content, who can help the current small community of Wikipedia reach out its message to a larger number of potential new Wikipedians.

• Techwomen although they aren't necessarily supporters of Open-source technologies themselves, however they are supporters of technology. Techwomen groups extend in our countries of interest, with willingness to spread the word around Wikipedia. With little orientation around how to edit and how licensing works, Techwomen become effective outreach collaborators. They also help with our gender gap issue :)

• Taghreedat is an initiative that aims at Arabization of Twitter, we are currently investigating possible areas of collaboration.

Regional visits

As of February 2011, we have already visited and started activities in Egypt (given that WMF consultant is based in Egypt) and WMF Tunisia. Below is a tentative schedule of our next stops:

March 2012:

19-20 Amman, Jordan

19 Community gathering & meeting Mozilla community + deciding on event for the week after

20 Wikipedia workshop for Techwomen conference

21 -24 Morocco

21 - Arrive in Casablanca + visiting national library in Rabat + train to Tangier

22 - Community gathering + Wikipedia awareness session in Tangier @ a FOSS supporter NGO

23 - Wikipedia session in Meknès cultural center + train to Fez (visiting Kairouane library)

24 - Wikipedia workshop for Techwomen in Fez + community gathering

25 -26 Cairo, Egypt

25 Arrive in Cairo for meetings with legal counselor and other NGO advisory + dinner with community

26 Lecture at A2K center + meetings Mozilla and FOSS communities

26-27 Amman, Jordan

26 Arrive and community gathering

27 Lecture at Colombia Middle East Research Center

28 - 31 Beirut, Lebanon

28 March FOSS and Bloggers gathering

29 Barry to Keynote at Arabnet summit

30 Arabnet +dinner with community

31 Arabnet Summit

April 2012

16 Wikipedia session at university of Medèa

17 Community meeting in Oran

18 Visiting the national library in Algiers