Crowd sourcing helps improve Arab online content

Abu Dhabi: Only 3 per cent of online content is in Arabic but crowdsourcing initiated by online social enterprises are helping to improve that share, top executives of an online enterprise said at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit on Thursday.

Giving an example of such an initiative, Mustafa Mubarak, Co-Founder of Taghreedat, a regional Arabic e-content provider, said his organisation translated 6,500 English terms to Arabic (which were never translated before) within 19 hours with the support of its more than 6,000 online volunteer translators.

It is part of their efforts to eliminate ‘Arabese’, typing Arabic with English letters, from online world. “We don’t want Arabic get poorer after five years,” Mubarak said.

Explaining the crucial transformation in media in recent years with the advent of social media, Mina Nagy Takla, Co-Founder of Taghreedat, said: “Yesterday content was created for the crowd; now crowd is the source of content.”

They were talking at a roundtable titled “Everyone is talking; New Media, New world” at the media summit.

Taghreedat is a regional Arabic e-content community building brand with a large and growing community of Arab volunteer translators in over 28 countries, of which are 20 Arab countries, including the UAE.

Mubarak and Takla founded Taghreedat back in July 2011 as an unprecedented online community initiative that takes a user-centred approach to enrich Arabic digital content on the web. With over 100,000 followers on Twitter and a prestigious list of stakeholders including Twitter, the Wikimedia Foundation, Storify and TED, Taghreedat (@Taghreedat on Twitter) has been able to have a unique impact on enriching Arabic digital content through localisation and community projects with a wide community of over 6,000 volunteer Arab translators from 31 countries worldwide including the Middle East, the UK, the US and Australia.

About the relevance of social entrepreneurship, they said until recently the word ‘social’ was detached from entrepreneurship. But social enterprises are spearheading the changes in many sectors including the media.

Takla said their organisation was able to destroy certain misconceptions about social media users. “There was a popular impression that social media users are lazy, incapable and shallow so they cannot do more than chatting, social networking and posting jokes online. But we proved that they can generate useful online contents.”