Ubuntu Wiki

WikiLebanon is an online Arabic news community delivering unbiased information to Lebanese citizens around the world. WikiLebanon.net not only automatically aggregates and classifies news from thousands of online sources but also enables citizens to create and share their own local news. The project is currently under development and being pre-selected by the UN for its Digital Arabic Content competition.

In Lebanon, as well as in other Arabic countries, media is controlled and often generated by political groups with an ambitious political agenda. Therefore, news is not only manipulated to match these political agendas but also delivered passively to the population. Moreover, International media frequently interprets events very differently from local media leading to a major misunderstanding between Western and Arabic societies.

As a nonprofit project, WikiLebanon is designed to make a positive social impact on people’s lives by facilitating national unity, creating a culture of acceptance and empowering citizens. The WikiLebanon portal in real time lists every event to which news from most available yet usually opposing sources is added enabling readers to view, comments and share every piece of information. The simple feature of enabling Lebanese to read competing viewpoints of major events affecting their lives is a giant step towards creating a culture of acceptance among citizens. Additionally, and for the first time on a Arabic portal, users can create their own content, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.

Using the latest cutting edge open source content management systems and algorithms, WikiLebanon is designed to deliver real time news entirely automated! There is no human editor behind it - it finds relationships between news stories from all major local, regional and international news sites and blogs and regroups, categorizes, ranks, tags, finds related stories and publishes them directly on the site in 3 languages (Arabic, English and French). The result is an efficient overview of everything happening, right when it happens. Additionally, harnessing the power of main stream social networks such as Facebook or niche social networks such as Digg and del.icio.us, the portal will naturally integrate with them enabling users to interact with the site without leaving their preferred network. A WikiLebanon Facebook application is already on the project’s roadmap!

Project's leader: Johnny Khawand

LebanonTeam's Work

Ubuntu-LB Team provided Ubuntu Server OS (where the project is installed on). As well as support to this project, such as:

• Administration
• Maintenance
• Backups
• Security

Note: The project's leader is recruiting developers. You could contact him here.

We hope everyone would participate in this unique project.