BREAKING NEWS

Palestinian to launch $10 mln Arabic online encyclopedia

By REUTERS

JULY 9, 2013 17:21

DUBAI - A 75-year-old Palestinian businessman is on a $10 million mission to boost Arabic on the Internet, where it accounts for less than 1 percent of websites despite being spoken by one in 20 people worldwide.

If Talal Abu Ghazaleh, owner of the education and professional services firm Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization (TAG-Org), has his way, the end of this year will see the launch of Tagipedia, a free online Arabic encyclopedia with a million entries.

"I see it as a means of building an Arab knowledge society, which is my mission in life ... to contribute to the economic and social development of the Arab world," he told Reuters.

About 350 million people, or 5 percent of the world's population, consider Arabic their first language, while hundreds of millions more are familiar with it through Islam's holy book, the Koran.

Yet only 0.9 percent of websites use Arabic, placing it 13th overall behind the likes of Polish and Dutch, according to the analysts W3techs.

"For a language with a great heritage and culture, that is very modest," said the effervescent Ghazaleh, who says his company has spent more than $10 million developing Tagipedia over the past five years, and will fund its running costs, keeping it free of advertising.

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