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Welcome to the Arab world WikiProject on the English Wikipedia! We are a group dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to the Arab world. If you would like to join us, please feel free to add your name to the list of project members!
This WikiProject was formed to foster better articles on the Arab world with a spirit of cooperation. This page and its future subpages contain suggestions on formatting and layout of articles, which can be discussed at the project's talk page.
The project generally considers any article related to historical or modern-day Arab subjects to be within its scope. A more detailed description of the scope, and our primary focus areas within it, may be found in the section on project scope.
Internally, the project has developed several structural features to help in managing our work:
Departments, which host work on several specialized tasks, including article quality assessment, detailed article and content review, and project outreach.
Please add articles to be created. Make sure you respect Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Arabic) guideline. Please also make sure if the article is already existing using other spellings.
The recommendations presented in this section are intended to be guidelines only; while they are well-suited for the vast majority of Arab world articles, there exist a number of peculiar cases where, for lack of a better solution, alternate approaches have been taken. These exceptions are often the result of protracted negotiation; if something seems unusual or out-of-place, it may be worthwhile to ask before attempting to change it, as there might be reasons for the oddity that are not immediately obvious!
Policy requires that articles reference only reliable sources; however, this is a minimal condition, rather than a final goal. With the exception of certain recent topics that have not yet become the subject of extensive secondary analysis, and for which a lower standard may be temporarily permitted, articles on the Arab world should aim to be based primarily on published secondary works by reputable historians. The use of high-quality primary sources is also appropriate, but care should be taken to use them correctly, without straying into original research. Editors are encouraged to extensively survey the available literature—and, in particular, any available historiographic commentary—regarding an article's topic in order to identify every source considered to be authoritative or significant; these sources should, if possible, be directly consulted when writing the article.
The nature of historical material requires that articles be thoroughly—even exhaustively—cited. At a minimum, the following all require direct citation:
Direct quotations of outside material
Paraphase or other borrowing of ideas from an outside source
Controversial or disputed statements
Subjective or qualitative judgements
Numerical quantities or statistics
In general, any statement for which a citation has been explicitly requested by another editor should be provided with one as well.
Beyond this, editors are encouraged to cite any statement that is obscure or difficult to find in the available sources, as well as any significant statement in general. There is no numerical requirement for a particular density of citations or for some predetermined number of citations in an article; editors are expected to use their best judgment as to how much citation is appropriate. When in doubt, cite; additional citations are harmless at worst, and may prove invaluable in the long term.
Footnotes are generally the more appropriate option when the level of citation is very dense, or where the citations include additional commentary. A number of different formatting styles are available; so long as an article is internally consistent, the choice of which to use is left to the discretion of the major editors. For example, discursive notes may either be combined with citations (ashere and here), or separated (ashere).
A single footnote may be used to provide citations for any amount of material; while they typically apply to one or a few sentences, they may also cover entire paragraphs or sections of text. In cases where the connection between the citations and the material cited is not obvious, it is helpful to describe it explicitly (e.g. "For the details of the operation, see Smith, First Book, 143–188, and Jones, Another Book, chapters 2–7; for the international reaction, see Thomas, Yet Another Book, 122–191").
Harvard-style references are useful where a limited number of simple citations is needed; they typically should not be used if the article has a significant number of other items in parentheses, or if citations must be accompanied by commentary.
The final choice of which style to follow is left to the discretion of an article's editors.
Requesting citations
Editors should attempt to take a reasonable approach when requesting citations. Unless the accuracy of a statement is in significant doubt, it is generally better to start with a request for citations on the article's talk page, rather than by inserting {{fact}} tags—particularly large numbers of such tags—into the article. Over-tagging should be avoided; if a large portion of the article is uncited, adding an {{unreferenced}}or{{citation style}} tag to an entire section is usually more helpful than simply placing {{fact}} tags on every sentence. Note that some articles contain per-paragraph citations, so checking the citations at the end of a paragraph may yield information about facts or figures in the paragraph as a whole.
However, if a concept coming from Arabic culture has a usual English translation, but has a specific meaning in Arabic context, this specific meaning can be explained in a separate article with a transliterated name, if, and only if, this doesn't make a POV fork, and the transliterated form is verifiably in common use in English in this specific meaning, that is: more common than a (descriptive) translation.
Romanisation is the general term for the transformation of words from Arabic or other foreign scripts to words that use the Latin alphabet. Only when such transformation is systematised in a letter by letter system this can be called transliteration. Many words that have Arabic roots have a romanised equivalent in English, that is commonly used and thus has become a translation, e.g. algorithm, algorism, Cairo, Mecca,...
Whether such words are transliterations in a strict sense, or more loose romanisations is of no importance: if there's a format that is commonly used in English, that format is used as a page name in English Wikipedia. If a strict transliteration differs from this common English version of an Arabic word, this transliteration is mentioned in the lead section of the article (e.g.『Muḥammad 'Anwar as-Sādāt』in the Anwar Al Sadat case).
For definitions of "Arabic article", "primary transliteration", "standard transliteration" and "strict transliteration" see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Arabic).
If an Arabic article has a primary transliteration, then it should be used as the article title.
If an Arabic article has no primary transliteration, then the standard transliteration should be used as the article title.
The strict transliteration should not be used in article titles.
Avoid diacritics, dots, lines, or other unprintable character in page names for content pages (e.g. "ḍ"): page names should always be usable as hyperlinks, so, depending on browser/operating system/font/stylesheet combination the sign under the letter gets crossed and would be indiscernible (e.g., "ḍ").
See also printability for a general treatment of the printability issue.
The following types of Arab world figures are considered to always be notable:
Kings, Presidents, Prime ministers and military Generals and Commanders who commanded a substantial body of troops (such as an army or fleet, or a significant portion of one) in combat.
Sportspeople, artists, academics, scientists, singers who are notable internationally or within the Arab diaspora.
People who are the primary topic of one or more published secondary works.
If an Arab World figure does not meet any of the above, but has non-trivial mention in one or more published secondary works (family history and genealogies excluded), they are probably notable.
Any person that is only mentioned in genealogical records or family histories, or is traceable only through primary documents, is probably not notable.
"In popular culture" sections should be avoided unless the subject has had a well-cited and notable impact on popular culture. If present, the section should be a prose discussion of the subject's cultural significance, cited from reliable sources. In particular, the following should be avoided:
Compendiums of every trivial appearance of the subject in pop culture (trivia)
Unsupported speculation about cultural significance or fictional likenesses (original research)
This section provides a brief list of major points that should be addressed before an article is listed as a featured article candidate; some of them are general recommendations, while others are related specifically to common objections candidate articles encounter.
Know the criteria
Perhaps the most basic element of writing an article that meets the featured article criteria is knowing what those criteria are. Becoming familiar with the formal list is vital; beyond that, it's often useful to review current featured articles and ongoing candidacies to get a better grasp of how the criteria are typically applied in practice.
Take advantage of the review process
Articles nominated for featured status should already be of a superlative quality, as attempts to fix major problems during the featured article nomination itself are usually chaotic and unsuccessful. Thus, the article should be reviewed for potential problems before a nomination is made. A full review process is outlined below; while these steps are not required, they are usually quite helpful:
Peer review: the peer review can offer exhaustive suggestions for improvement; it can be undertaken at any point, but is most useful once a majority of the article's content is present. This can run for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
A-Class review: the review for A-Class status is less flexible, and serves primarily to verify that the major criteria for featured article status are met; it runs for four days.
Featured article nomination: the final step is the formal nomination for featured article status; it can run anywhere from a week to a month.
Check your citations
Perhaps the most critical flaw in an article—and among the few that serve to guarantee a failed featured article candidacy—is a lack of proper citations. An article should have copious inline citations, preferably from high-quality scholarly sources such as published historical works; for more information, see the project's sourcing and citation guidelines.
Ensure the article has been copyedited
One of the most common objections that articles encounter is that the prose is too dense or poorly written. It is incumbent on editors to ensure that an article has been thoroughly copyedited before being nominated for featured status; while this can be done, to an extent, on one's own articles, asking someone unfamiliar with the text to review it is generally very helpful in catching less obvious stylistic problems.
Find suitable illustrations
While lavish illustration is not a requirement (but is nevertheless a good thing, where enough images are available), particular attention must be paid to cartography; in articles about battles or wars, the lack of a suitable map can result in numerous objections to a featured article candidacy. Some resources for obtaining suitable maps can be found here.
Watch the length
While editors are encouraged to expand articles, there comes a time when the overall length of an article becomes a potential problem for readers; if you find that an article is becoming too long, consider splitting it up or moving some of the information to other articles. More advice on recommended bounds for article size can be found here; note, however, that the numbers given are usually applied only to the prose of the article, and do not include additional material (such as footnotes or reference lists).
Be mindful of resolution settings
Higher monitor resolution settings can have the adverse effect of leaving large spaces between paragraphs if too many images or tables are present in one area or along one margin of an article. Consider alternating images from left to right to help prevent large spacing between sections, and leaving extra room below tables and images before adding any additional media to that side of the page. Other editors who use higher or lower resolution settings can help you identify any areas of an article that may need reformating to address this.
The assessment department focuses on determining and tracking the quality of Wikipedia's Arab world articles; the resulting statistics are used to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.
The outreach department acts as a central location for various member outreach work, including project newsletters, recruitment and welcoming banners, and other related initiatives.
The media department tries to centralize all discussions over all type of media (images, maps, bibliography, etc...). It also features the media gallery.
The review department conducts both informal peer reviews of articles, as well as formal reviews for A-Class status; it also provides a centralized forum for viewing external reviews (such as featured article candidacies) within the project's scope.
The {{WPARAB}} project banner template should be added (not subst:ed) to the talk page of every article within the scope of the project. While the template does not require any additional parameters, it has a number of optional ones that add various extra features to the banner. The full syntax and usage instructions are documented on a separate subpage.
Please address requests for particular images directly to the Graphic Lab, the Illustration WikiProject, or the Maps WikiProject. To ensure that requests can be considered, it is helpful to provide material such as external images, images from Wikimedia Commons, or clear text descriptions.
If an image is available online, but cannot be uploaded to Wikipedia, it may be appropriate to use {{External media}} to provide a direct link to the image and a (referenced) description of what the image depicts.
Wikimedia Commons
The category structure used by Wikimedia Commons parallels the one used here to a certain extent, starting from the same top-level categories:
Note, however, that much of the Commons categorization scheme is in an embryonic stage; and that the need for category names to be comprehensible to non-English-speaking users has resulted in some naming conventions that may diverge quite widely from the ones with which Wikipedia editors are familiar.
Maps
Please address requests for the creation of new maps or the evaluation of existing ones to the Maps WikiProject.
WikiProject guides
Culture and the arts
Geographical
History and society
Science, technology
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