‘For the love of our culture’: Volunteers teem to Arabic Wikipedia

A growing band of volunteers is toiling to populate Arabic Wikipedia

driven by pride in their language and heritage

Location: Boca Raton, Florida

(SOUNDBITE) (English) REGIONAL MANAGER AT THE WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION, JACK RABAH, SAYING: "We have seen this grow now to almost 1 million articles on Arabic Wikipedia. Just to put things in perspective, in 2015, Arabic Wikipedia was around 400,000 articles. So now you see that the growth is exploding with time."

More than 15,000 people made 1.6 million edits

to Wikipedia’s Arabic-language content in 2020

and created more than 77,000 new entries

Location: Tunis, Tunisia

(SOUNDBITE) (Arabic) TUNISIAN CONTRIBUTOR, EMNA MIZOUNI, SAYING: "We are volunteers for the love of the Arabic language, for the love of our culture, for the love of our countries and for the love of knowledge in general."

Location: Erbil, Iraq

(SOUNDBITE) (ARABIC) IRAQI VOLUNTEER AND TELECOMS ENGINEER, SARAMAD YASEEN, SAYING: "We have a deep-rooted civilization, we have writers, we have poets, we have creative people in all fields.”