Tag: encyclopedia

Shawshara, An Online Encyclopedia For Arabic Music

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ShawsharaShawshara is a community based project aimed at collecting and documenting all aspects of Arabic music in an online encyclopedia.

Shawshara is set up as a wiki based platform enabling anyone to add and modify the contents of any page, without the interference of site administrators, in order to enrich the content and grow the database.

The site currently contains over 25 Arabic artists, their biographies and discographies that translate into several hundred albums, and over 700 song pages which include the song’s lyrics, lyrics translated into English and other languages, transliteration and videos.

Shawshara

The site interface is presented in both English and Arabic, and so is the content, which is translated and transliterated into English, and in some cases into other languages as well.

Shawshara was founded by Waseem Sayegh, a Palestinian, currently living and studying in Canada.
It is powered by MediaWiki, the same open source software that runs Wikipedia.

Abu Dhabi Authority For Culture And Heritage To Launch Online Poetry Encyclopaedia

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Poetry EncyclopaediaThe Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) has announced that it will soon launch a website that serves as the latest issue of the poetry encyclopaedia, to coincide with the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, held on March 2009. 

The fourth edition of the encyclopaedia, whose publishing rights are owned by ADACH, will include: 2,693 poetry collections (which mount to 2,890,301 verses or 138,641 poems). In addition, it will have 1,081 books on scientific, literary and historical heritage.

Many of the original poetry collections have been provided with huge additional content. For example, the third edition Ahmed Shawqi’s collection had 376 poems (11,724 verses), while the fourth edition includes 776 poems (16,517 verses). 

Work on the poetry encyclopaedia began in 1997 and the National Library launched the first edition in 1998, which included nearly 180,000 verses of 88 poets, in addition to the Arabic dictionary ‘Lisan Al Arab’ (the Arab tongue) of Ibn Mandhour. 

Jumaa Al Qubaisi, Director of the National Library, said ADACH was keen that the poetry encyclopaedia, in its new look, remains committed to the high refined taste of its Arab readers, in its collections of selected Arab poets – old and new. The poetry encyclopaedia did not set as a pre-condition of only including previously published poetry collections as its editors believe that many glorious poets, whose poems can be found in different places, did not have their poetry collections published, while not every poet whose work has been fully published means that his/her work is of a valuable significance. 

There are books that deal with the poetry of some of the Arab tribes, the poetry of a certain country or region, the poems of people belonging to certain religion or sect, as well as ones focused on female poets only.

The encyclopaedia also provides a search engine to help researchers. 

The fourth edition of the poetry encyclopaedia will be available online for all visitors of the ADACH website.

Dahsha, An Online Arabic Encyclopedia

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DahshaDahsha is an Arabic online encyclopedia and one of the serious efforts to enrich Arab content on the internet. A lot like Wikipedia, the encyclopedia relies on volunteers to write articles and publish content.

Volunteers can post books, reports, studies, articles and even video, audio and useful programs to the encyclopedia.

Even though I usually encourage Arab users to try and focus on enriching the Arab version of a global encyclopedia like Wikipedia instead of launching smaller regional or local versions, this project is still a pretty interesting one as it covers some types of content that Wikipedia doesn’t support.

The system isn’t as open as Wikipedia though, as users can’t change or edit articles by other users; they can only reply or comment on them. Which means that the site’s administrators have to be more involved in reviewing the submitted content, its quality, and whether publishing it violates any copyright laws.

It’s a good service overall, even though I think there should be some work done to enhance the usability of the posting, replying and commenting features. And as it’s an interactive service built on user contributions, it’d also be interesting to have more details about these user’s profiles, and some more social media features like content rating, bookmarking and suggestions according to the reader’s interests.

The encyclopedia already has a big volume of content published in it covering different categories and topics from computer science and technology related content to art, literature and religion.

Dahsha screenshot

The interface is Arabic only for the time being. The service was launched by Jordanian software and web development company Jordan Tek.

# Dahsha Encyclopedia

New Deal To Launch Free Arabic Encyclopedia Online

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Emirates Internet Group has signed a cooperation agreement with Abu Ghazaleh Group to establish a free Arabic encyclopedia on the Internet.

The encyclopedia will cover a lot of applied science, and the human, economic and technology aspects will be addressed to the Arabic user, to enrich the electronic content of the Arabic language and to build a scientific referenced academic site with high quality.

A specialized committee of academics and scientists will insure the control of articles, and monitor and evaluate them from the perspective of academic and research centers. The enrichment of the encyclopedia will depend on the participation of knowledge specialists in specific fields, as the participants can correct and discuss and also to add more information in the encyclopedia, without violating the rights of the author or any other rights .

Two thoughts cross my mind in response to this piece of news: one is a very positive one; it’s great to see these Arab groups investing in knowledge and working to create more Arab content online.

On the other hand, I’m not too sure about the approach; instead of launching a whole new encyclopedia from scratch, with all the difficulties and costs that will entail, why not support the little groups of people from all over the Arab world who are passionately working on growing the Arabic version of Wikipedia?
I mean the platform already exists, it’s open, it’s easy to use, and it already has a head start, the teams are there already inputting information, and many people already trust it and use it, so why not just use that?
Is it so that it can be labeled as an Arab project? But isn’t the goal what’s most important? To share knowledge and get more Arab content out there?

I personally think this project would have more chances of success if it were to go with enriching the Arabic version of Wikipedia instead of creating a whole new encyclopedia, and I fear that if they don’t it’ll only end up like every other previous Arab initiative.

# Source: BI-ME