Arabic Wikipedia #
July 22nd, 2008 | In Worth Knowing
Being a native (and, to my chagrin, monolingual) English speaker I’ve never much considered Wikipedia in other languages. The Arabic version is prehaps the most conspicuously small:
It has fewer than 65,000 articles, and ranks 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial tongue, Esperanto.
Some possible reasons:
…young people find it easier to communicate in English online — whether chatting, sending instant messages or contributing to Wikipedia — both because not all keyboards are compatible with the Arabic alphabet and because they want their words to be more accessible to the wider world. (Some write in Arabic using the Roman alphabet.)