First online Arabic encyclopedia

TAG-Org invests $10 million in Tagipedia

Tagipedia, the first online Arabic encyclopedia, was launched in Beirut by businessman Talal Abou Ghazaleh, owner of the education and professional services firm TAG-org, among other companies. Tagipedia will be officially running by end-2013 and users will be able to access its information for free. Investment in the project has reached $10 million.

Rana Reda, Training Officer at the company, said they are currently seeking to expand the work team. “The announcement of Tagipedia will attract interested experts from the region, to help us with the data collection and preparation.”

Reda said this initiative was driven by the fact that about 350 million people (five percent of the world's population) are native Arabic speakers. Yet, only 0.9 percent of websites use the language.

Tagipedia will kick off with one million articles – more than three times the current number of Arabic articles on Wikipedia.

The project’s operating costs are not yet defined, as the final team is not yet ready. “We have 80 offices worldwide which will be participating in financing the encyclopedia,” she said. This way, the company aims to keep Tagipedia free of advertizing. “We consider it part of our CSR activity.”

Unlike Wikipedia, Tagipedia is a library where all content will be verified before posting, to keep only correct, useful, and non-offensive information.