Arabic Wikipedia
The Arabic Wikipedia (Arabic: ويكيبيديا العربية) is the Modern Standard Arabic version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of April 2024, it has 1,231,143 articles, 2,569,598 registered users and 54,060 files and it is the 17th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 8th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was the first Wikipedia in a Semitic language to exceed 100,000 articles on 25 May 2009, and also the first Semitic language to exceed 1 million articles, on 17 November 2019.
The logo of Arabic Wikipedia, a globe with puzzle pieces featuring several glyphs from various writing systems. In response to the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, the pieces are in the colours of the Palestinian flag | |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
|---|---|
| Available in | Arabic |
| Headquarters | Miami, Florida |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Arab wiki community |
| URL | ar |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 9 July 2003 |
The design of the Arabic Wikipedia differs somewhat from other Wikipedias. Most notably, since Arabic is written right-to-left, the location of links is a mirror image of those Wikipedias in languages written left-to-right. Before Wikipedia was updated to MediaWiki 1.16, Arabic Wikipedia had a default page background of the site inspired by Arabic/Islamic tiling or ornament styles. Switching from MediaWiki's new default Vector layout to the original MonoBook layout may restore this page background.
Three varieties of Arabic have their own Wikipedia: Standard, Egyptian, and Moroccan. Additionally, Maltese, derived from Arabic, has its own Wikipedia.