The Arabic Wikipedia () is the Modern Standard Arabic version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of , it has articles, registered users and files and it is the largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 8th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was the first Wikipedia in a Semitic language to exceed 100,000 articles on 25 May 2009, and also the first Semitic language to exceed 1 million articles, on 17 November 2019. The design of the Arabic Wikipedia differs somewhat from other Wikipedias. Most notably, since Arabic is written right-to-left, the location of links is a mirror image of those Wikipedias in languages written left-to-right. Before Wikipedia was updated to MediaWiki 1.16, Arabic Wikipedia had a default page background of the site inspired by Arabic/Islamic tiling or ornament styles. Switching from MediaWiki's new default Vector layout to the original MonoBook layout may restore this page background. Three varieties of Arabic have their own Wikipedia: Standard, Egyptian, and Moroccan. Additionally, Maltese, derived from Arabic, has its own Wikipedia. History At the emergence of the Wikipedia project in 2001, there were calls to create an Arabic domain raised by Arab engineers. The domain was created as "ar.wikipedia.org" but no serious activity took place except with anonymous users who experimented with the idea. Until 7 February 2003, all contributors to the Arabic Wikipedia were non-Arab volunteers from the International Project Wikipedia that handled the technical aspects. Elizabeth Bauer, who used the user name Elian in the Arabic Wikipedia, approached many Arabic speakers who potentially might be interested in volunteering to spearhead the Arabic project. The only group who responded was the ArabEyes team who were involved in Arabizing the Open Source initiatives. Elian's request was conservatively received and the ArabEyes team was ready to participate but not take a leadership role and then declined to participate on the second of February 2003. During this negotiation time, volunteer users from the German Wikipedia project continued to develop the technical infrastructure of the Arabic Wikipedia backbone. In 2003 Rami Tarawneh (), a Jordanian PhD student in Germany who originated from Zarqa, encountered the English Wikipedia and began to edit content. Contributors encouraged him to start an Arabic Wikipedia. The Arabic Wikipedia opened in July 2003. By that year a significant group of contributors included Tarawneh and four other Jordanians studying in Germany. On 7 February 2004, one