The internet would be unrecognizable without Wikipedia. Thanks to the digital, open-collaborative encyclopedia, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, we now have unprecedented access to the sum of human knowledge; everything our species has learned and experienced, written, digitized and catalogued in easily digestible records. And it is all a few screen taps away. If only things were that simple. This absurdly easy access masks a far more complicated reality. After all, Wikipedia attempts the impossible feat of keeping a record of the vast, universal human experience; the countless singularities, distinctions and paradigms it encompasses, and the great forces and events that have shaped people’s lives since the beginning of time. The online encyclopedia, which is maintained by a community of contributors and volunteer editors, writers and researchers from across the world, has over 300 editions and is available in virtually all languages and dialects. This makes Wikipedia a fairly diverse platform, but as with all things created in the image of men, women are far from equally represented. In Egypt, the MENA region and the Arabic-speaking world at large, a group of volunteers and contributors have been working tirelessly,…
From English to Arabic: Are Wikipedia’s Egalitarian Values Getting Lost in Translation?
March 20, 2021
