Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, discusses Wikipedia’s Arabic language projects. Wikipedia has a fairly small Arabic Wikipedia presence with only about 150,000 articles and 600 regular contributors and is looking to dramatically scale its presence on the Arabic web.

Wikipedia is collaborating with Cairo University to encourage students to create new articles based on what they are studying and also to translate other articles into Arabic. They are hoping to get students involved across the region to enhance the depth of Arabic content on Wikipedia.

“It’s critical that people take the view that they have something to share, it doesn’t have to be perfect...we really want to help create a mindset in the region that those small contributions, when added across millions of people, can create something incredible,” Newstead explains.

Newstead also discusses the Wiki Loves Monuments photography competition to document notable sites throughout the world.