Ammon News - AMMAN — The Jordan Open Source Association will soon start training university students on how to increase Arabic content on the web, the association's president, Issa Mahasneh, said Saturday.

The training, to begin within a few weeks, is part of an initiative to boost Arabic content on the Internet, he added.

"We will train public and private university students on how to contribute articles in Arabic to Wikipedia on different topics," Mahasneh noted.

The programme, which is implemented as part of a project in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, seeks to encourage university students to add articles related to their specialties in Arabic on the free encyclopaedia, he said.

"Students, whether specialised in IT, history, environment, health, agriculture or other fields, can contribute by writing Arabic articles that will enrich the quality of online Arabic content," Mahasneh said.

"We encourage all intellectuals to contribute to the Arabic content on the Web, which is still lacking in spite of the increased in number of Internet users in the Arab world," he said.

Currently, only 2 per cent of all Web content is in Arabic, although Arabic speakers account for 5 per cent of global Internet users, according to Google.

About 65 per cent of Arab Internet users look for Arabic content.

A nonprofit organisation that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to "empower a global volunteer community to collect and develop the world's knowledge and to make it available to everyone for free, for any purpose". (by Mohammad Ghazal | The Jordan Times)