URL: http://wikilebanon.org/
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.
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!
Inspired from major news
aggregators such as news.google.com, techmeme.com and
esciencenews.com, WikiLebanon technical open source infrastructure is
both innovative and feasible. As a first automated Arabic news
aggregator, the site will enable user generated content as well as
integration with existing social networks. The technology is based on
the mature yet evolving open source content management system, Drupal
(more information on www.drupal.org)
and on other open source news aggregations, classification and
scoring technical modules.
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