The Arabic Wikipedia () is the Modern Standard Arabic version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of , it has articles, registered users and files and it is the largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 4th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was the first Wikipedia in a Semitic language to exceed 100,000 articles on 25 May 2009, and also the first Semitic language to exceed 1 million articles, on 17 November 2019.
Three varieties of Arabic have their own Wikipedia: Standard, Egyptian, and Moroccan. Additionally, Maltese, derived from Arabic, has its own Wikipedia.
thumb|"Edit" button on Arabic Wikipedia screenshot, old background in 2008
History
Arab Wikipedians meeting during Wikimania conference in [[Hong Kong|thumb]]
At the emergence of the Wikipedia project in 2001, there were calls to create an Arabic domain raised by Arab engineers. The domain was created as "ar.wikipedia.org" but no serious activity took place except with anonymous users who experimented with the idea. Until 7 February 2003, all contributors to the Arabic Wikipedia were non-Arab volunteers from the International Project Wikipedia that handled the technical aspects. Elizabeth Bauer, who used the user name Elian in the Arabic Wikipedia, approached many Arabic speakers who potentially might be interested in volunteering to spearhead the Arabic project. The only group who responded was the ArabEyes team who were involved in Arabizing the Open Source initiatives. Elian's request was conservatively received and the ArabEyes team was ready to participate but not take a leadership role and then declined to participate on the second of February 2003. During this negotiation time, volunteer users from the German Wikipedia project continued to develop the technical infrastructure of the Arabic Wikipedia backbone.
In 2003, Rami Tarawneh (), a Jordanian PhD student in Germany who originated from Zarqa, encountered the English Wikipedia and began to edit content. Contributors encouraged him to start an Arabic Wikipedia. The Arabic Wikipedia opened in July 2003. By that year a significant group of contributors included Tarawneh and four other Jordanians studying in Germany. one member from the ArabEyes, Isam Bayazidi (), volunteered with four other friends to be involved with the Arabic Wikipedia and assumed some leadership roles. In 2004, Bayazid was assigned the SysOp responsibilities and he, with another 5 volunteers, namely Ayman, Abo Suleiman, Mustapha Ahmad and Bassem Jarkas are considered to be the first Arabs to lead the Wikipedia project and they are attributed for working on translating and enforcing the English policies to Arabic. The Arabic Wikipedia faced many challenges at its inception. In February 2004, it was considered to be the worst Wikipedia project among all other languages. However, in 2005, it showed phenomenal progress by which in December 2005, the total number of articles reached 8,285. By that time, there were fewer than 20 contributors and the administrators and contributors made efforts to recruit new users. Cohen stated that fewer than 10% of Egyptians are estimated to have internet access and of those with internet access many tend to be knowledgeable in English and have a preference of communicating in that language. At the time there were hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles on the Arabic Wikipedia.
Iraqi volunteers have translated much of English Wikipedia into Arabic Wikipedia. More recently, a project named Bayt Alhikma has translated more than 10,000 articles about science and other topics in Arabic. The number of active users in Arabic Wikipedia is increasing quickly, reaching the 10,000 mark for first time on 10 February 2021.
Evaluation
thumb|right|The countries in which the Arabic Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in [[teal.]]
At Wikimania 2008, Jimmy Wales argued that high-profile arrests like those of Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer could be hampering the development of the Arabic Wikipedia by making editors afraid to contribute.
In 2010, Tarek Al Kaziri, from Radio Netherlands Worldwide, believed that the Arabic Wikipedia reflected the Arabic reality in general. Low participation lowers the probability that the articles are reviewed, developed and updated, and political polarisation of participants is likely to lead to biases in the articles.
According to Alexa Internet, on 26 November 2014, the Arabic Wikipedia was the 10th most visited language version of Wikipedia over a month, with the "ar.wikipedia.org" subdomain attracting approximately 1.8% of the total visitors of the "wikipedia.org" website, despite being ranked no. 22 in terms of the article count. In terms of page views, it was ranked 11th in September 2018 with the same nine Wikipedias above it plus the Polish one. Among the larger Wikipedias, it has one of the lowest ratios of new editors retention and one of the highest rates of edit reversions.
Usage and page views by country
thumb|right|Page views on the Arabic Wikipedia, breakdown by country over time.
Florence Devouard, the former president of the Wikimedia Foundation, stated in 2010 that the largest number of articles on the Arabic Wikipedia were written by Egyptians and that the Egyptians were more likely to participate in the Arabic Wikipedia compared to other groups.
Generally, Arabic Wikipedia, as of 2018, is the most popular language version of Wikipedia in most Arab countries, except Tunisia, Comoros, Chad, Lebanon, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE. Arabic Wikipedia has its highest percentages in Egypt, Libya and the countries of the Levant (except Israel and Lebanon) and the Arabian peninsula. This discrepancy happens because of the deficits of Wikipedia in Arabic regarding quality and quantity, while in the latter three the lead of English there is associated with the fact that most residents there are migrants from various countries, such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines and other countries, where English is the most popular language there.
As of December 2022, Arabic receives around to 180 to 260 million pageviews per month, depending on the season. The most pageviews are recorded in winter and spring.
Censorship
Saudi Arabia
Ba'athist Syria
Criticisms and controversies
Allegations of bias
The Arabic Wikipedia has been criticized for an alleged Middle Eastern-centric content bias on religious and political topics.
A June 2024 article in the Jerusalem Post criticized the Arabic Wikipedia's article on the war for downplaying Hamas' attacks on civilians and Iran's involvement, among other issues.
Criticism of content
In mid-2020, the Arabic Wikipedia was criticized for deleting its version of the article on Sarah Hegazi after a deletion discussion that found there was a consensus the article did not meet the criteria for notability. Some Arabic LGBT activists on social media accused the Arabic Wikipedia of bias against the LGBT community, and claim the action to be part of censorship, hate speech, and homophobia in the Middle East. The news website Raseef22 criticized Arabic Wikipedia's policies, and said that the project was controlled by prejudiced administrators who reject articles about minorities and women. The administrators of the Arabic Wikipedia said that the deletion process is a normal procedure and has nothing to do with the subject or targeting specific issues.
In April 2022, the European Union's East StratCom Task Force reported that four pro-Kremlin disinformation news outlets (SouthFront, NewsFront, InfoRos and Strategic Culture Foundation) were referenced in 70 articles of the Arabic Wikipedia. This made it the second Wikipedia edition most affected by such disinformation, behind the Russian Wikipedia.