wiki – StartUpArabia

Shawshara 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.

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.

Alexandria, Egypt, will be hosting Wikimania 2008 this Summer in the prestigious newly reconstructed library of Alexandria, Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Wikimania is a regular conference for all Wikimedians that contribute to one of the many Wikimedia Foundation projects. Past conferences have been held in popular cities around the world, such as Frankfurt, Boston and Taipei, but this is the first time the event is being held in an Arab country.

As in previous years, Wikimania 2008 will include unconferences, seminars, and workshops. The Wikimania 2008 committee, comprised primarily of volunteers, will be organizing the event, and has already begun lining up sponsors. The program is still being planned, you can follow the planning here.

Registration for the event is open now, and details on how to register and attend can be found here: Registration.

# Wikimania 2008 Alexandria, Arabic Wikipedia

Tag: wiki

Shawshara, An Online Encyclopedia For Arabic Music

Wikimania 2008 – Alexandria, Egypt (July 17-19)