Arabic Wikitravel Expedition

The Arabic Wikitravel Expedition is an expedition to create an Arabic-language version of Wikitravel.

For more information on multilingual Wikitravel policy, please see Wikitravel:Language version policy.

Rationale

Arabic is a language spoken in almost all Middle East and North Africa countries. There are 422 million native speakers worldwide. These travelers would be well-served by a Wikitravel travel guide in their language.

In addition, contributions in Arabic would help the other Wikitravel language versions. Many Arabic-speaking areas are major travel destinations; having locals update information in their native tongue (which could then be translated to other languages) would make for better information in all the Wikitravel guides. Arabic-speakers are also frequent travelers and would have a lot to contribute on other destinations and topics.

Goals

This Expedition has the following goals:

• To collect a good base of Arabic-speaking users willing to take this project further.
• To choose a go-between who can keep users on the English-language site up-to-date on developments on Arabic Wikitravel, and vice-versa
• To translate the interface files for Wikitravel into Arabic
• To launch the new Arabic-language Wikitravel.
• To translate the pages and create the infrastructure necessary to make Arabic Wikitravel useful and friendly for new Example-speaking contributors.
• To make Arabic Wikitravel an integrated part of the Wikitravel family.

Procedure

See also Wikitravel:Language version policy for more information about the procedure of forming a French Wikitravel.

Completed: Gathering a team of users

To get this project started, we need at least 3 Arabic-speaking users willing to contribute to Arabic Wikitravel.

Please add your name below, by editing this page, if you support this project. please log in (see How to create a user account -- it's really quick) and then add your name below, by choosing edit this page. and sign the list below. To sign, type four tildes (~~~~)

I agree to forming the Arabic Wikitravel and am willing to contribute:

• Ahmed Elmorsy Ahmedelmorsy 09:32, 23 June 2008 (EDT)
• Mohamed Yasser Mohamed nour 09:25, 23 June 2008 (EDT)
• Doaa Ashour Doaa Ashour 09:27, 23 June 2008 (EDT)
• Kareem El-SayedKimo 09:29, 23 June 2008 (EDT)

Go-between

If there are no objections, Mohamed Nour, the person who started this Expedition, has volunteered to act as go-between for this new language.

Kareem El Sayed Kimo 09:19, 23 June 2008 (EDT)

Language interface file

MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikitravel, uses a language interface file to make the links and names and prompts and stuff readable in other languages. We need to customize a new version to work for Arabic Wikitravel.

We can collaboratively do this at LanguageAr.php. It's started off with the Wikipedia language file, and we can use the English en:Wikitravel:Language.php file as a reference for things that need to be changed. It's mostly just changing the name of the site (Wikipedia -> Wikitravel), the name of the license, and the names of some important pages.

Issues

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