There are over 350 million Arabic speakers in the world, yet we estimate that less than 1% of web pages are written in Arabic. In the past, access to the web and the knowledge it contains was limited to a privileged few who could often rely on another language to satisfy their search needs. Fortunately today access to the web is spreading fast in the Arabic region and is quickly reaching all layers of society. We can observe this evolution in real-time by watching the phenomenal internet traffic growth in the region.
These new users of the web rely on Arabic for their search tasks, by choice or necessity. Today these people are ill served because of the relative lack of high quality online information written in Arabic. Most people also remember the ancient Library of Alexandria as a vibrant illustration that the current imbalance of knowledge access used to be in favor of the Arabic language.
A team of Arabic engineers at Google has been hard at work to provide a solution. We decided to work directly with the largest local Universities. Every year hundreds of thousands of students are taught an enormous volume of knowledge, our goal was to help these students and professors make some of that knowledge accessible to the public. We started a
pilot project at the Alexandria University school of medicine. The response from faculty and students was enthusiastic and the result was the creation of a large number of medical articles available online and exclusively written in Arabic. A few examples:
Knol on Intra Ocular Implantation (زراعة العدسات داخل العين) written by
Prof. Ahmed El-Massry
Knol on high blood pressure (إرتفاع ضغط الدم) written by medical student
Mohamed Shehata
Watch the video documenting the first competition:
Building on this success we now have
5 large universities engaged in the initiative, both in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and we expect more to join soon. Students are currently writing thousands of articles on a variety of subjects including arts, engineering, medicine, poetry to name a few. A couple of examples:
Knol on the world's economic crisis written by King Fahd Univ student
Salman AlKhozim:
Knol on the world's economic crisis written by Assiut Univ student
Mohamed Fathi:
In a few weeks we would like to honor the writers that contributed the most to improving access to online knowledge for Arabic speakers. You can help us find them! Please go to
www.arabicknol.com and browse the many articles that have been written since the start of this initiative. You can rate articles on their quality, respond to a content survey, leave a comment or question for the author and even write a formal review if you have more to say. Of course you can also write your own knol and it will automatically become part of the great collection of Arabic articles. Let's take on this big issue and start sharing your knowledge.
المعرفة مشاركة،
شارك بما تعرف -
knol.google.com
Posted by Ahmed Gaballah
