AN ARAB(IC) SUCCESS STORY Although Arabic is the world’s fifth largest language community, less than one percent of the internet is written in the language. Mawdoo3.com set about to change that.
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s a multilingual and multicultural school in the Middle East with students and faculty from over 40 countries, King’s Academy embraces every opportunity to celebrate that diversity. King’s is also very much a Jordanian school, with strong ties to its Arab identity, language and culture. As such, World Arabic Language Day — observed around the world on December 18 — is an important date on the school calendar, one that enables the school community to celebrate the language spoken, or studied, by almost everyone on campus. This year, Najeeb Fakhoury ’19, Mustafa Hourani ’19 and Yamama Almghawish ’20 took the lead in organizing an Arabic language event on December 5 to mark the occasion, in collaboration with Arabic faculty members from the Department of Communication, Rhetoric and Literary Arts.
BY MUNA AL-ALUL
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The headliner of the evening was guest speaker Rami Al Qawasmi, one of the co-founders of Mawdoo3. com, the world’s first comprehensive online Arabic encyclopedia that uses the wiki system, similar to Wikipedia — Mawdoo3 literally means “subject” in Arabic. Mawdoo3.com was initially established in 2010 after its cofounders, Hashemite University students Rami Al Qawasmi and Mohammad Jaber met while doing volunteer work. Jaber was a medical student who had established an organization called Jordan Volunteers, but he also had a passion for entrepreneurship. A year earlier, he had come up with the idea for Mawdoo3.com after reading books on e-marketing. Although Arabic is the world’s fifth largest language community, spoken by 4.5 percent of the world’s population, less than one percent of the internet is written in the language. There is a huge void where Arabic content should be, and thus a huge potential for demand. Jaber’s research revealed an opportunity to enrich the Arabic content on the internet with high quality articles, and to develop an analysis service for keywords in Arabic. A year after Jaber and Al Qawasmi founded Mawdoo3.com, the startup was awarded first place in the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition, in the universities and academics category. In 2012, the partners opened a small office, officially launching their company. Their goal was for Mawdoo3.com to become the number one site in the Arab world, and to fill the void in reliable digital Arabic content by publishing credible, informative articles of a high editorial standard on topics ranging from art, science and health, to business, sports and history, to advice, beauty and food. Starting out, however, they were only publishing 20 articles a month.
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“When we reached 10 users on our site at the same time, we were so excited,” said Al Qawasmi, remembering Mawdoo3.com’s humble beginnings. “There wasn’t a demand for our services at first. We tried to attract advertisers, but they wouldn’t give us the time of day unless we had over a million visitors to our site, which we didn’t at that point.” To achieve their goals, they needed to convince others to support them, starting with their friends who helped them out financially. Then, in 2014, Al Qawasmi and Jaber convinced Dubai-based investor EquiTrust to support them to the tune of $1.5 million.
“We tried to attract advertisers, but they wouldn’t give us the time of day unless we had over a million visitors to our site, which we didn’t at that point.”
With that injection of funds, Mawdoo3.com has grown from strength to strength. Today the site produces tens of thousands of articles a month, employs 65 full-time employees as well as around 400 paid experts and contributors. It has up to 20 million visitors a month, and 42 million users, of which 30 million are unique. Al Qawasmi and Jaber reached their goal; Mawdoo3.com is now the number one Arabic website, beating out all of the competition. Quality is key, according to Al Qawasmi. He strongly believes that Mawdoo3.com has a responsibility to its millions of users to provide accurate, trustworthy and highquality content. It only publishes original informational articles —
what he calls “evergreen content” — while rejecting opinion, news and promotional pieces. Its in-house auditing team is responsible for verifying the content of every article for plagiarism, and reviewing and editing for accuracy and quality. Al Qawasmi’s talk was followed by a lively question and answer session with students fascinated not only by the entrepreneurial aspect of Mawdoo3.com’s meteoric rise to fame, but also the technology behind it. Al Qawasmi explained how Mawdoo3.com is the first site to use artificial intelligence in Arabic. Its powerful search engine is a constantly evolving system designed to identify, sort and present the data most likely to meet the needs of users. As the site is used more and more, its computers are learning more Arabic language every day. The search engine also helps to generate new article ideas; the website receives over 4 million searches each month, any topic that is not found on the website is reported to the team, who prioritize that subject to be written about. In just a few short years, Mawdoo3. com has gone from being an idea hatched by two university students, to becoming the one of the world’s most essential Arabic language resources on thousands of subjects for over 370 million Arabic speakers. According to Al Qawasmi, there was one thing above all others that resulted in their company’s success: finding, and hiring, like-minded people. Jaber and Al Qawasmi’s passion for volunteer work led them to each other, and to establishing Mawdoo3.com. That formula has continued to work for them. “I believe that if you do good, good will come to you. Many of our employees were found through volunteering,” says Al Qawasmi. “They are the secret to our success.”