Wikimedia, the non-profit which oversees Wikipedia, is holding its annual conference in Alexandria, Egypt. One of the debates making headlines is the discussion about how to facilitate the growth of the Arabic language Wikipedia which is the 29th largest Wikipedia - well behind the imaginary language Esperanto. This is an issue which has been persisting within the Wikipedia community for a number of years: how do you create an online, user-generated encyclopedia in a language whose speakers have little access to the Internet or free time to contribute?

I was first introduced to this issue by a question posed by Ethan Zuckerman at Berkman@10. He asked Jimmy Wales how the desperately poor could be expected to take the time to contribute to Wikipedia. His concern was perceptive and suggests that generating online content is a post-materialist pursuit. Only after attaining a certain level of material security can people afford to contribute to human knowledge. Others, too, have noticed this. At the 2nd Wikimania Conference in 2006, a Dutch Wikipedian, Kasper Souren, spoke about paying $1 for speakers of Bambara, a language of 3 million speakers in Mali, to contribute an article. Through this method he was able to amass more than 100 articles by the 2006 conference, but as of today, the Bambara Wikipedia only has 211 articles. I’m not sure if Mr. Souren is still soliciting articles in this manner or if he stopped, but, either way, I’m not convinced this is the way to create a viable native-language Wikipedia.

In The Gift, Lewis Hyde goes to great length to explain the ways in which the gift economy operate differently than the commodity economy. When money is introduced into a system, it undergoes substantial changes in ethic. The market efficiently allocates many things, but Wikipedia exists in a non-monetary economy. People contribute for many reasons, but the English language Wikiepdia did not reach more than 2 million articles because people wanted a new source of income. To convince Bambara speakers to contribute to Wikipedia, one needs to understand the motivations of a Wikipedian - reputation, principled support of universal access to knowledge or social.

In preparation for the 2006 Wikimania Conference, Ethan wrote an insightful post about the bilingual Wikipedians who decide to write in English instead of their native language. He notes that the tendency to edit the English Wikipedia probably comes from the desire to “influence perception and opinion on topics important to them by creating articles on political figures, important issues, issues of national or regional pride. And it makes sense to contribute to the wikipedia which has a broad audience and, therefore, a maximum chance of being read and influencing opinion.” I would tie this directly to the well-documented “reputation economy” which motivates open source programmers and many Wikipedians. As he points out, until a critical mass is reached in the Bambara Wikipedia, or any other smaller project, it may not be worth the time to edit it, even if you have the time, because your edits are falling trees in an empty forest. How, then, can Wikipedia make it a reputable task to edit smaller languages? Leader-boards or some other public displays of affection for editors? One might think that it comes down to paying for contributions until a critical mass is reached and it is worth people’s time to contribute. But what is that critical mass? And how would one go about stopping payments? The hypocrisy of paying for smaller encyclopedias until they reach a certain size would disillusion many would-be contributors.

Which brings us back to the Arabic Wikipedia. Cultural (Arab opposition to creating technology) and technical (lack of Arabic keyboards) reasons have been proposed to explain the lack of articles, but I don’t buy either. Sure, technicalities may cause incremental difficulty, but plenty of non-Roman languages have flourishing Wikipedias and the idea that Arabic-speakers are for some reason opposed to editing online encyclopedias is not very convincing.

Which makes an attempted solution so promising:

One volunteer, Abdel Rahman Hussein, an engineering student in Alexandria, pointed to the Facebook page he help administrate for the conference (593 members) and showed the events they had staged to spread the word long before the visitors had arrived. He said he had shown more than 1,000 people how to contribute to Wikipedia at his college in May. Bloggers have been enlisted, and some have added a banner in Arabic encouraging people to build up Arabic Wikipedia.

This takes advantage of the social and web-native nature of Wikipedia. By teaching people to edit Wikipedia and showing that it is socially acceptable, Abdel and the blogging community are providing an important impetus for the enabling of a community around the Arabic Wikipedia.

Update: See Ethan’s response to this post, where he considers the popularity of blogging in Egypt compared to Wikipedia.