• How Good Is The Mainstream Media At Linking Out?
  An interesting overview of how some different MSM sites link to blogs and other citizen media, from a quantitative analysis perspective
  (tags: journalism media citizenmedia data)

There’s nothing like a meeting on the future of journalism to get you concerned about the future of journalism. While there are some brilliant and exciting ideas discussed at conferences like the Knight Foundation-sponsored meeting I attended yesterday, there’s also a very clear sense that some of the very basic questions surrounding the future of journalism remain unanswered. The biggest of those questions seems to be, “Who’s going to pay for it?” and I’ve not heard any very compelling new answers to the question lately.

Unfortunately, there’s still at least two strands of conversation that seem impossible to avoid at thee events, one cyberskeptic and one tech-utopian. The cyberskeptic strand is insistent on reminding us that blogging won’t replace journalism, that very little blogging is journalism and that we must continue training professional journalists. All true, but this argument often misses the point that the bloggers who do engage in journalism are often our best hope for high-quality, insightful, profesional journalism in the future, and that there need not be a wall between the two worlds. Many newspapers seem to be getting this, incorporating staff and citizen blogs into their coverage, and it surprises me that this conversation continues at these sorts of events. (Then again, maybe I’m too optimistic. Mark Glaser’s latest column suggests that journalists may be fleeing newsrooms because change isn’t happening fast enough.)

My other surprise is how powerful tech evangelists can be at these events and how little skepticism there is about future tech in the journalism world. Coming from the tech world, I’m acutely aware that there are millions of geeks who want nothing more than to create The Next Big Thing… and the vast majority of these NBTs are neither next nor big. I think there’s a ongoing sense of shell-shock in the newspaper business from the ways in which technological innovation has changed business models and threatened the world as we know it. If Craigslist could destroy the classified business, what could Second Life do to us? The semantic web? QT codes? Obviously we’ve got to start using all this stuff RIGHT NOW before we get left in the dust again. I’m speculating, of course, but that’s the best explanation I can come up with for ideas like Esquire magazine’s hefty fiscal investment to add a BLINK tag to the September cover of their magazine.

This may explain why I’m so grateful for Mindy McAdams’s “get over it” post, listing ten “facts” about the future of newspapers, journalism and online media. The facts are not entirely without controversy, but they represent a helpful trend, in my opinion – an attempt to limit these discussions, take certain issues off the table and focus on questions where we don’t have good solutions. McAdams points to a pair of Ryan Sholin posts in the same spirit that I’d missed previously. We’re hosting a small conversation at Berkman tomorrow on business models for “difficult journalism” and I’m hoping we can start by agreeing on a large set of issues that are generally well-understood and no longer in need of discussion.

Clay Shirky offers a great example of this sort of thinking with a (fairly) recent piece that begins, “Nick Carr is right. Now what?” Carr is a provocative commentator who gets a lot of things right, including his observation that newspapers don’t currently know how to pay for high-quality journalism with web-based advertising. (This is one of McAdams’s facts as well.) Clay’s “now what?” includes a specific challenge – figure out how to pay for investigative journalism. But he’s got a general question that’s more important: what are the important bits of newspapers we want to save in an era where content is increasingly “unbundled”? More to the point, what are the bits that need saving, that are difficult for amateurs to build or unlikely to be built in the absence of professional intervention?

Investigative journalism is one of fields that I’m not convinced that bloggers are going to solve all by ourselves. While there are some good examples of bloggers adding key technical expertise to a story – Rathergate springs to mind – and cases where bloggers have broken substantial stories – TPM’s work on the Attorney General firings – there’s a lot to be said for a newsroom of paid reporters backed by toothy lawyers when you’re trying to document NSA wiretapping, for instance. This sort of reporting requires long-term commitment, the ability for multiple reporters to interview hundreds of sources, a legal department that can respond in court to obstacles to transparency, and sometimes shield laws to protect authors from having to reveal sources. As much as I’d like to see a smarter shield law that protects everyone who’s doing journalism, I think there’s a good chance that we’re going to need professional newsrooms to perform investigative journalism for years to come. It will be interesting to see whether efforts like Spot.Us, which tries to raise community funds for in-depth community journalism, will be able to sponsor this sort of reporting.

Also high on my list of things to save is well-contextualized international news. It’s possible these days to read most people’s local newspapers. It’s much harder to understand them. Language isn’t the only issue – reading a story in a local newspaper generally assumes local context. And what’s interesting to a local audience can be much less interesting to an international one… and vice versa. (Lots more about this here.) To write about truly important international issues, it’s sometimes critical to have more than just local perspectives – you need a reporter who can weave together stories and examples from different parts of the world. Needless to say, this takes resources – most people don’t have the luxury of roaming the world to report complex stories. And the sorts of collaboration neccesary to tell stories from multiple points of view is possible in amateur efforts, but not very well developed yet.

Two more that might be less obvious: agenda-setting and serendipity. I’m increasingly convinced that we want to preserve two of the functions of the front page of the newspaper. (This is not the same thing as preserving the front page of the newspaper.) One of the functions of the front page is to tell you what basic news you need to be an engaged and informed citizen that day. Another is to offer you introductions to stories that aren’t required knowledge, but might intersect with your interests. I think there’s a general suspicion of these functions of the paper, because they require human editing and gatekeeping. But I also think they’re something we discard at our own risk – see posts on serendipity and the architecture of newspapers for more thoughts on why.

Those four functions are far from an exhaustive list. What do you think we should save from the current vision of the newspaper, and how do we save it?

• A Priest Walks Into Qatar and . . . – washingtonpost.com
  Excellent essay from an Irish catholic priest on the differences in teaching theology in the US and Qatar. A good argument that many Americans don’t understand what it’s like to be rooted in faith
  (tags: religion xenophilia diplomacy education qatar islam christianity)

The Knight Foundation has been very good about ensuring their grantees know each other, so many of the projects presented at our meeting in Chicago today are pretty familiar to me. But I hadn’t heard about Patchwork Nation, a project funded by Knight to “explode the myth of red and blue America.” Managed by Dante Chinni, a former politics columnist with the Christian Science Monitor, the project builds on work done by professor James Gimpel. Gimpel has crunched huge sets of demographic and census data and classified American counties not as red (Republican, conservative, religious) and blue (Democratic, liberal, secular), but in eleven different categories.

These categories include some predictable ones, like industrial cities and immigrant epicentres – it also includes some communities I hadn’t thought about, like boom towns (rapidly expanding communities, especially in the mountain west) and service worker centers (areas where almost all jobs are in hospitality, tourism and trades, not in agriculture, education or manufacturing.) I turn out to live in one of these service worker counties, and the generalizations about the county (an increasing hispanic population, more Catholics than Protestants, low median income) turn out to be spot on…

Chinni has picked representative communities in each of these eleven community types and has recruited a blogger there. He emails the bloggers on a weekly basis, soliciting posts with suggested topics. They’re often able to identify political and economic issues that might be invisible to a system just looking at a simple, bipolar view of the nation. Chinni is tracking the travel of the presidential candidates and classifying each destination in terms of these eleven categories – he observes that McCain disproportionately visits boom towns, which tend to provide political and financial support for his work, while Obama’s travel is much broader. (Both, it turns out, spend a lot of time in industrial cities. And unsurprisingly, McCain also spends a lot of time in “empty nest” communities.)

I’m vaguely skeptical of these sorts of reclassifications of political types, but I was impressed by the way in which the Patchwork Nation map matched the character of communities I know well… and I was deeply surprised to discover that I was a close demographic fit for my county according to their survey tool… closer than I am to Cambridge, MA where I work.

The project is getting a great deal of attention and is likely to be featured on Politico.com and NPR in the near future. Will be very interesting to see if American political discourse can expand from two types of communities to eleven. (Which raises the question, of course, of whether more boxes are better, or whether boxes just make you dumb.)

Kristen Taylor, the online community manager for the Knight Foundation, is a seasoned videoblogger with a focus on foodblogging. (Here she is, telling you what to do with scallops, mangos and bacon.) As such, she’s a great person to give the room full of journalists an intro to what tey might do with hosting and sharing video online.

YouTube is a must, says Kristen, if only because it’s got huge mindshare and audience… but it’s probably the least friendly and appealing for the video authors. For serious, serial videobloggers, she prefers blip.tv, which allows people to create shows with a consistent intro, outro, logo and branding, encouraging creators to make a commitment to producing series, not just individual posts. Kristen uses Vimeo, a tool designed to let people share HD video and believes it has the best picture quality, but she’s intrigued by Viddler, which allows comments on specific moments within a video. (While cool, she points out that this can be a moderation challenge.)

Kristen tells us that, today, she’s vlogging using Flickr. While Flickr allows you to post very quickly, it has size limits that limit the length of your video, making the clips more like “a long photo” than a traditional video segment. With this many places to post, Kristen recommends Tube Mogul, a free service that allows you to upload a video once and publish it on multiple platforms.

She offers a useful set of tips for incorporating video in blogposts (some of which I’m bad about following):

- Contextualize video as you would a blockquote
- Indicate the file size and format of the video
- Link to HD versions of the video – they’re usually too bit to incorporate them online
- Explain the player functionality to your readers
- Plan for comment moderation, as you’re going to need to moderate.

The discussion afterwards raises the issue of subtitling, where Kristen recommends dot.sub, which allows you not just to publish videos with subtitles, but let anyone add subtitles in their language to your video. Seesmic also comes up as a suggestion for quick and easy videoblogging, pointing out that Seesmic allows video recording through a flash application, rather than a standalone application.

As I was putting these notes together, I came across a post from Afrigadget, telling me that they’ve moved their hosted video to Zoopy, a social media site based in South Africa. Worth checking out as well…

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports a huge range of journalistic programs, ranging from experimental efforts in community journalism to massive players in the media ecosystem like National Public Radio. 180 of their grantees are in Chicago today at a meeting hosted by Knight designed to build connections between grantees and encourage cross-fertilization of projects. (The Rising Voices project of Global Voices is supported by the Knight Foundation, which is why I’m here.)

It’s also an interesting opportunity to see how people in the journalism world are looking at the business and technical challenges facing the field. The opening speakers, Rosental Alves from the University of Texas and Dianne Lynch from Ithaca College offer quite a bit of disparity in their views of journalism in a digital age. Rosental, who is a pioneering Brazilian journalist and a board member for Global Voices, is a devout cyberenthusiast, while Dianne, the Dean of the Park School of communications, is decidedly more skeptical

Rosental argues that it’s a mistake to think about the current changes in the journalism world as just another business cycle – it’s a revolution, he argues, comparable to the invention of the press or the industrial revolution. In this revolution, we shouldn’t expect broadcast media to disappear, but should expect people to experience media with people like themselves, to try to discover media that people like themselves are interested in.

The very nature of newspapers has changed, Rosental argues – “newspapers are now a hybrid of atoms and bits”. In some ways, the English language is a limitation here – in Portuguese, the word for newspaper is “jornal”, a word that has no implications about the physical delivery of the information. In a new journalism, the digital aspect of the work will be at the center, not at the periphery. Journalists need to discover new ways to tell stories in this medium, to engage communities in their work and to move beyond the “anachronism of the one-way web”.

Lynch is skeptical that the world Rosental promises is here, now. She argues that “news consumers are not early adopters”. Instead, they’re “brand loyal”, willing to stay with their newspapers or sources like Yahoo news. Most consumers don’t read blogs, and those who do trust them even less than they trust news obtained from their neighbors. (Her stats here are from Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2008 – they’re somewhat controversial figures, as some bloggers argue, as Amy Gahran did here, that some readers don’t know when they’re reading blog content.) She argues that citizen media is less open to comments than mainstream media. (I’m sitting next to Dan Gillmor, who points out that bloggers often react by posting on their own blogs, not neccesarily by posting comments.)

Bloggers are not, defacto, journalists, she argues. And journalism is alive and well, if suffering some major revenue problems – she points to the influence of Craigslist and Tulia in destroying the real estate classified market. Readership is up, if we incude online as well as offline readership, and the ad market is still pretty huge, at $45.5 billion last year. But she urges journalists not to obsess with the technology, but to “look through it” towards their function as journalists.

So perhaps bloggers versus journalists isn’t over. Or perhaps we’re simply not able to have a journalism conference without flogging this dead horse a few more times.

• Letter from China: Angry Youth: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
  Excellent portrait of Tang Jie, a Chinese philosophy student and author of a nationalistic video that was warmly received by Chinese audiences on YouTube. Useful insights into Chinese cybernationalism
  (tags: nationalism china video ideas internet)
• YouTube – 2008 !China Stand Up! 2008,中国，站起来！
  Tang Jie’s cybernationalist video, focusing on China’s complaints about western media, alleged market manipulation and pollitical inconsistencies
  (tags: china video nationalism youtube)
• Password Chart
  Interesting idea for generating cryptographically strong passwords by combining two weaker passwords and a couple of client-side javascript functions. Would love an analysis by a real cryptographer of its utility
  (tags: computing crypto javascript personal privacy security tools software)
• From Near the Bottom, a Way Up
  Jim Forster, a huge-hearted engineer from Cisco, shares stories and photos from his recent trip to Guinea Bissau, with some interesting observations about the power of communications infrastructure in Africa
  (tags: africa guinea bissau internet connectivity conflict infrastructure)

Project for Excellence in Journalism released an excellent study today titled, “The Changing Newsroom“. Based on survey responses from 259 newspapers and in-depth interviews with senior executives at 15 newspapers, it’s a very thorough study of changes to the content and business models of American newspapers. If there’s a single conclusion one could draw from the study, it’s that newspapers have radically changed their ambitions from providing a wide view of news around the world, to providing excellent local content. This isn’t always an easy change. One editor said that the hardest loss in his newsroom has been “the concept of who and what we are”.

For those of us who hope that journalism will thrive in a digital age, this report includes the good, the bad and the ugly. On the good side, there’s ample evidence that newspapers have embraced the internet and, as Jay Rosen memorably said almost four years ago, “bloggers versus journalists is over.” Not only is virtually every newspaper expanding their web presence and migrating fast-moving content on the web into the next edition of the paper, the majority of papers (100% of large newspaper – circulation 100k+ – and 63% of smaller papers) have started staff blogs. Most of these blogs are either unedited or edited after publication. And 40% of papers (50% of large papers) now incorporate some form of citizen media into their coverage, and very few editors (less than 10%) rejected the idea that citizen media could be incorporated in some form into professional journalism. (There’s a possible pro-geek bias in the survey, which was conducted via email, leading participants to an online survey. True luddite editors were likely left out of the sample set.)

While newspapers are publishing less news overall, they’re publishing more, shorter pieces, and some editors feel like they’re providing better breadth of coverage. And 56% of editors felt like the quality of their paper was better than 3 years ago, with 29% conceding that their papers are now “different”.

The bad news is that newspapers haven’t figured out how to make money online. Roughly 90% of revenue for the newspapers surveyed comes from their print editions, not from online sections. 59% reported staff cuts in the past three years, and 61% reported reducing their “newshole”, the part of the paper that actually prints news. And 73% of papers have physically shrunk, using smaller page size, a move that’s often associated with shrinking the overall size of a newspaper. 97% of editors report that they’re actively involved with searching for new revenue streams for their papers… so much for that Chinese wall between the editor and publisher.

The ugly news, so far as I’m concerned, has to do with the change of mission of the newspaper, specifically a shift away from foreign and national news to an increased focus on local and community news. 64% of newspapers reported that they’d decreased the amount of foreign coverage in their papers, and 46% said they’d reduced the number of reporters focused on these stories. There were dramatic declines in national news coverage as well, with 50% of papers reporting less space on these sorts of stories. 62% of papers have increased their coverage of community news, and while 97% of newspaper editors called local news “very essential” to their papers, only 10% felt that international news was very essential.

This makes a certain amount of sense. Newspapers realize that they’re in a different world than ten years ago. People who are interested in following international news are likely to look for international news online, or in a major newspaper like the New York Times. What’s worrisome is that it’s not clear that the major newspapers are going to step up to the task. They’re also looking local, with 94% calling local news very essential and only 28% calling international coverage very essential. The percentage of large circulation papers who’ve cut international news coverage over the past three years is slightly larger than the percentage of small papers (which may reflect earlier cuts made by those smaller papers.)

Local coverage makes economic sense for newspapers. Most newspaper advertisers are local – they may be pleased that the paper’s coverage can potentially reach international audiences, but they’re selling to people in the paper’s geographic area, and they’re most concerned with content specifically for that local audience. Local content is much, much cheaper than sending reporters overseas to cover stories, and the temptation to cover international stories using wire services has led newspapers like the Boston Globe and Baltimore Sun to close their last overseas bureas. The consequence – whatever international content a paper publishes is content that is available elsewhere, published in a major paper like the Times or the Washington Post or available via a wire service.

This trend isn’t new, by the way. In 1997, James Hoge Jr., the editor of the influential journal Foreign Affairs, published an essay memorably titled, “Foreign News: Who Gives a Damn?” Hoge saw a steep drop in international coverage from the early 1970s to the 1990s, and noted, “Except for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90, the coverage of such internaitonal news in American media has steadily declined since the late seventies, when the cold war lost its sense of imminent danger.” Depending on who you ask, the trend may be even longer than that – in the brilliant “The Creation of the Media“, Paul Starr notes that newspapers in pre-revolutionary America routinely published 75% or more international news – publishers were skeptical that readers would pay to hear about news they could get from talking to their neighbors.

Hoge suggests that the drop in news coverage from the 1970s to the 1990s had to do with the end of the Cold War, and the perception of the world as a safer – and therefore less interesting – place. The same circumstances that compelled Francis Fukayama to declare the end of history seemed to offer good reasons to stop reading the international section of the newspaper. But recent events – 9/11, bombings in Bali, Riyadh, Casablanca, Jakarta, Istanbul, London and Madrid, long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, as well as the international dynamics surrounding global warming, petroleum prices and a worldwide economic downturn – would all seem to offer compelling reasons for readers to care about international news.

If there’s less international news in newspapers (and, as other studies suggest, in television newscasts), is that the fault of news organizations, who’ve figured out that it’s more economical to deliver local coverage, or is it the fault of consumers, who aren’t demanding more international news? The PEJ study doesn’t address this directly, but offers a depressing note from one editor, who tells the interviewer that readers complain vociferously when the paper removes TV listings or shrinks the crossword, but hasn’t complained about cuts in international or domestic coverage.

My fear is that international news will fall victim to a collective action problem, a version of the tragedy of the commons. For each individual paper, it’s in their economic interest to focus on local news and hope that readers who have a concern with international news will read that paper as well as the local paper, or access that paper online. Unfortunately, this appears to be leading to a situation in which only the largest papers are able to deploy resources to cover international stories and small and mid-sized papers are simply delivering wire service content. What happens if the New York Times or Washington Post decide it’s not economically viable to continue providing international coverage? Recent cuts at the LA Times – one of the papers historically committed to international reporting – are likely to shrink its coverage dramatically.

I wonder if, on some level, a lot of webfolk believe that we’re going to move into a new media space where everyone focuses on reporting local news well, and where we can get a global picture by reading lots of local news from around the world. (Indeed, that’s one way to think about what we do at Global Voices.) That’s not going to work, for two reasons. Local coverage is contextualized for local audiences. Read a story from a local newspaper across the country or across the world and you’ll discover there’s background information missing that you’d need to understand the story – the editor of the local paper expects you to know the distances between places, the identity and backstory of prominent people mentioned in the paper. Reading a story without context makes you more likely to misinterpret, and can make it much harder to connect with the story.

I’m able to read newspaper stories from hundreds of African newspapers via AllAfrica.com, and while I follow African events more closely than most Americans, I often end up needing to do research simply to read the daily news in most of these papers. It’s not that the stories are poorly written – they’re simply not written with me as part of the audience. (And then, of course, there are language issues. And issues around censorship and media control. If you want news from China on protest movements around property rights from local sources, you need context, language skills and experience hunting for underground media that you probably don’t have.)

There’s a more important reason why it’s hard to get global coverage by gluing together local coverage – you don’t know what to pay attention to. Local papers publish every day, whether there’s a lot or a little news – simply reading all of them isn;t an option. What responsible newspapers have done well for decades is organize information on their front pages so that readers know what they need to pay attention to, locally, nationally and globally. You may disagree with the decisions made by a publication, but this filtering function is incredibly important… and incredibly powerful. Without it, you’re left to search for information on topics you think are important, or seek out local coverage in places you think are important.

My experience is that people come to Global Voices for information on a story or a region when large newspapers or newscasts have declared a topic newsworthy. We’ve covered Burmese bloggers for years, but we only saw deep, sustained interest in what those bloggers were saying when the “saffron revolution” became front page news in American and European newspapers. These papers set the news agenda, and even in an age where web surfers can look for information on any concievable topic, my experience is that interest closely follows the news cycle. And if the newscycle focuses less on international news because newspapers dedicate fewer resources to international coverage, bloggers and net surfers will pay less attention to these stories online, I predict.

In his decade-old paper, Hoge wonders if we’re entering a period where international news matters only to a small group of people who feel like they’ve got political or business interests in the international sphere. I think that’s become true, with an expansion of that category to include hardcore news junkies, and I think those folks are looking for news in newspapers that have declared themselves to have international ambitions, like The Economist or The Guardian. What worries me is that, with less international news in newspapers and newscasts, most citizens are going to end up feeling like these are issues they have no information about, no opinions on, and no ability to influence. In a world where the hard local problems demand global solutions, that’s an ugly development indeed.

• Ping – Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto? – NYTimes.com
  An optimistic piece on tech startups in Nairobi from Pascal Zachary. “To be truly creative in a technological backwater is to defeat geography”
  (tags: kenya internet innovation creativity tech)

My friend Kevin Donovan has an interesting post today, wondering about the size of the Arabic-language wikipedia. As he observes, it’s smaller than the Esperanto wikipedia despite the fact that it’s likely the fifth most spoken language in the world, at least in terms of native speakers. (Esperanto, for the curious, is not the fourth most spoken language in the world.) Kevin is suspicious of attempts to pay people to contribute to small wikipedias, and wonders what sort of incentives in a gift economy might encourage people to author content for small Wikipedias.

Kevin references an old post of mine, where I tried to figure out the ratio of native speakers of a language to the number of wikipedia entries, and offer some speculation about the motivations of people who contribute to wikipedia in their mother tongues versus contributing in English. I suggested that some wikipedians might be contributing to the English-language wikipedia rather than their native wikipedias because they’ll have a much broader reach and influence, as the English-language wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular sites, while smaller wikipedias often have small audiences.

The question is a timely one, as the Wikimania conference just took place in Alexandria and may serve as a major impetus to encourage contributions to the Arabic Wikipedia. Kevin’s post speculates that there may be a form of “social permission” that lets people know that it’s okay to contribute to a project like wikipedia, even in absence of formal reward mechanisms. As I was reading this post (serendipity!), I got an email summarizing the results of an Egyptian government study on blogs from a friend who works with Jeeran.com. My friend was pleased by results that suggested that more than 70% of Egyptian bloggers were using Jeeran. I was staggered by the size of the Egyptian blogosphere:

- The total number of Arabic blogs is 450.000 blogs with a percentage of 0.7 % of the total number of blogs in the world. And the Egyptian blogs form 30.7 % of the Arabic blogs.
- 76.8 % of the Egyptian blogs use the Arabic language, 9.6 % are written in English, and 20.8 % are mixed.
- 73 % of the Egyptian bloggers are males, and 27 % are females.
- 53.1 % of the Egyptian bloggers are between 20 – 30 years old.

(I’m quoting my friend’s translation – the original report is in Arabic, and is available here as a pdf.)

Egypt is a big place, with over 80 million people. But net penetration is around 10%, and broadband penetration is much lower, with ITU estimates of only about 430,000 subscribers. In other words, there are roughly as many Egyptian bloggers as broadband subscribers, and roughly one of twenty Egyptian net users is a blogger, which isn’t a bad participation rate.

The mixed language nature of Egyptian blogs is particularly interesting – since the vast majority of Egyptians speak Arabic, this suggests roughly 30% of Egyptian bloggers – more than 100,000 people – have the linguistic skills neccesary to translate content from the English wikipedia into Arabic. And the whole mass of bloggers have the technical means to contribute to the Arabic wikiedia, should they be interested in doing so.

Which brings me to Kevin’s question about cultural “permission” to participate in a project. Blogging has gotten a lot of press in Egypt, much of it characterizing blogging as a highly political activity. A number of Egyptian bloggers have been imprisoned, either for their online writing or their offline activism, and it’s likely that some Egyptians think of blogging as a dangerous activity. That hasn’t stopped hundreds of thousands of young Egyptians from getting online. Here’s hoping that Wikimania and the press attention surrounding it helps recruit thousands of new authors to the Arabic wikipedia in the near future.

Bonus content:

Noam Cohen in the New York Times Bits blog talks in detail about the conversation about low participation in the Arabic Wikipedia at Wikimania.