Can Arab university students, in cooperation with Google, increase Arabic-language content on the World Wide Web, asks Nader Habib "The Arabic language is one of the oldest and most important in the world, but there is very little Arabic content on the Web, with Arabic representing only one per cent of total Web content," says Ahmed Gaballah, a software engineer at Google in California. While Arab users of the Internet have increased by nearly 1,000 per cent over the past seven years, and Arab surfers search for billions of items of information daily, material in Arabic can be hard to come by. This, however, may be about to change, at least if Gaballah and his team have their way. At Google "we have decided to offer tools like Knol [a knol is Google's name for the smallest unit of knowledge] and blogs where people can write their own thoughts for others to read to help Arab users of the Internet by increasing Arabic content on the Web. We also offer pages on the Google Knol service at www.arabicknol.com, where people can write high-quality articles in Arabic and publish them themselves," Gaballah, as a manager of knol service for Arabic language content, adds. In order to encourage writers to contribute to the Knol service, Google Knol has organised a competition among students from five of the Arab world's most prestigious universities. Students from these institutions, which include Cairo, Alexandria and Assiut universities in Egypt and King Saud and King Fahd universities in Saudi Arabia are taking part, the idea being to encourage them to contribute articles in Arabic to Knol, the university having the most number of students taking part winning the prize. While the competition is not yet over, current counts show King Saud University in a clear lead. Gaballah adds that the writers of articles for the service can enhance their pieces at any time by adding content, along with graphics, photos, charts, tables, videos, as well as the necessary references that will help to give academic respectability to their contributions. As Gaballah points out, crediting writers for their contributions and maintaining quality control means that readers using the service will trust what they read on Knol, especially in fields like medicine and engineering. No special skills are necessary to create a page on Knol, and it should be easy for any would-be contributor to start writing articles. The service features a standard template that includes places for the article's title, lead, text and references. There is also a space for readers to rank articles and to comment on them, in order to continuously improve. "The article ranking produced by readers is an important consideration in the competition," Gaballah comments. In order to guarantee the authenticity of the material on Knol, the system employs engineers using special software who check for spam and for plagiarised material. As far as the competition among universities is concerned, evaluation of the contributed articles is carried out by the writers' professors, themselves chosen by students at the institutions. Finally, a jury composed of academics will read the best 100 articles, before choosing an overall winner. In judging the material, the jury will be asked to look particularly at reader-friendliness as well as at accuracy. It is important that the general public is able to understand the material on Knol and that contributing writers are able to express their ideas to others if the service is to fulfil its full potential. Gaballah adds that if readers find material lacking from articles found on Knol, then they can add to them, giving the public the opportunity to share knowledge with others. Every week, Knol gives a list of topics for which writers need to be found, and this helps to ensure that the service attracts people from different countries around the world. According to Hisham Attia, a professor at the Faculty of Mass Communications at Cairo University, the service is of great value to students and young people in particular, since it gives them a convenient way of sharing their ideas. "They have the desire and the willingness to participate in the competition," he says, and the experience of doing so should enhance the Web presence of Arabic-language content by young people and give them the chance to make their views and opinions known. This will help their elders in turn to know what young people are thinking, Attia adds. Amr Ahmed, a student at the Faculty of Medicine at Alexandria University and one of the participants in the competition, said he had found out about the Knol competition from the university, but that he had already known about the service itself from using Google. Ahmed, a keen blogger of three years' standing, said he was happy to be able to contribute to Knol and had "decided to share my knowledge with my friends and the public more generally, especially since the aim of the service is to make material in Arabic more widely available." Ahmed adds that research has indicated that there is currently only one item in Arabic on the Web for every three Arabic- speakers, while there are six articles in German for every German-speaker. This is a catastrophic situation, Ahmed says, though he recognises that making up the difference will not be easy. One of eight Middle East "ambassadors" for Google Knol, he comments that while everything is being done to help students write well and to supply references for their articles, they sometimes still do not do so and even have the impression that there is something wrong about giving the sources of information. While Ahmed would like his institution to be the winner, he says that time is pressing and it may be too late for him to contribute more articles. "It is exam time, and I have a lot to do. Maybe later I will be able to find the time to contribute more material," he says. According to Attia, part of the value of the system lies in asking contributors to write a creative article of their own. "The idea is to help the writer to clarify his or her point of view when writing an article, and avoid giving a mere recitation of information or just a kind of cut-and-paste compilation of facts." In order for students to be creative in writing they need stimulation, Attia says, and the competitive framework of the Google scheme gives just the right degree of stimulation to produce valuable results. While the present lack of material in Arabic on the Internet is to be regretted, for Aboud Mustafa, a writer and the director of a well-known publishing house, this does not mean that the language itself is under threat, like many other languages. Whatever happens, Mustafa says, Arabic will survive. The competition organised by Knol, he says, "will help to increase Arabic content on the Web, and it will foster the development of new writers who will help to make knowledge more generally available throughout the Arab world." As an additional incentive to such writers, Mustafa adds that his publishing house might offer to print the winning articles from the Knol competition in book form, which, he feels, would "help other students to improve their writing skills." The five universities taking part are now waiting for Google to announce the competition winner, which should take place soon. However, whichever institution wins, and whichever articles and authors are picked out for special mention, it seems clear that the real winner will be all those who read and speak Arabic, who will find the amount of Arabic-language material on the Web increased as a result.
