Mawdoo3
 | |
 The Home Page in Mawdoo3 | |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
|---|---|
| Available in | Arabic |
| Owners | Mohammad Jaber, Rami Qawasmi |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | "Yes" |
| Current status | Active |
| Written in | wiki |
Mawdoo3, (in Template:Lang-arموضوع; literally "Subject") is an Arabic Online encyclopedia that uses the wiki system similar to Wikipedia. It was initially established in 2010 and officially launched in 2012 based in Jordan,[1] the founders were students in Hashemite University in Jordan, in order to enrich the Arabic content on the Internet with high quality articles, which offers analysis service for keywords in Arabic. The encyclopedia won the first prize for the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Award for the category of universities and academics in 2011.[2] To date the site boast more than 20 million visits per month, of which 12 million are unique,[3] and has published 40,000 articles, With a staff of more than 200 freelance writers they have 20 full-time employees.[2]
History
Establishment
The Idea of Mawdoo3 began with "Mohammed Jabr," who, when he was studying at the Hashemite University in Jordan, said: "The idea of the project came in late 2009 from reading a book in e-marketing during my summer vacation, which prompted me to further reading in this idea. I bought three specialized books and read them, which revealed to me the opportunity to build an Arabic project to develop analysis service keywords".[4]
Mawdoo3 was initially founded in 2010 by "Mohammed Jaber" and "Rami al-Qawasmi", which was Bootstrapped with personal money and that of family and friends. The startup was also the recipient of a first prize for the Queen Rania Business Plan Competition Award in 2011, when they were still students. It was officially launched in 2012.[2]
Partnerships
In August 2015, the Mawdoo3 announced that it received $1.5 million in Series A funding from Dubai based investor EquiTrust.[3] This funding will be invested to support Arabic content and increase the number of Arabic pages on the Internet as per the announcement.[2] In addition, Mawdoo3 held partnerships to increase the content with a number of publishers and institutions that provide them with high quality contents, those institutions were Mutah University, Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship, the Islamic World Academy of Sciences, Medical Reference "Altibbi.com", and the technical Arabic dictionary "Arabterm.com".[5]
The way it works
Mawdoo3 uses the wiki system, but Unlike Wikipedia, Mawdoo3.com adopts a more centralized operation model to create and upload content. The team is composed of 20 full-time employees, as well as hundreds of writers divided into paid experts and contributors, who write on specific topics according to special content strategy. It publishes original informational articles and rejects opinion, news, and promotional pieces. Prior to publishing, an in-house auditing team verifies the content of every article for plagiarism, and checks for correct language use. Translated articles are also welcome.[5]
Statistics
Visitors
According to the Alexa website (November, 2015), the distribution of the Arab visitors is as follow:[6]
| Order | Country | Percent of Visitors | Rank in Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Egypt |
24.3% | 142 |
| 2 |  Saudi Arabia |
22.8% | 147 |
| 3 |  Algeria |
17.4% | 62 |
| 4 |  Morocco |
6.9% | 126 |
| 5 |  Tunisia |
3.2% | 144 |
References
- ^ "Company Overview of Mawdoo3". BloombergBusiness. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
- ^ a b c d Lucy Knight (August 19, 2015). "Jordan's Mawdoo3 gets $1.5M in Series A funding". Wamda. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
- ^ a b Jane Hosking (September 7, 2015). "Online Encyclopedia Mawdoo3 Receives $1.5 Million in Funding". Venture Magazine. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
- ^ "'Mawdoo3' won the first prize for the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Award in 2011". Khaberni (in Arabic). Jordan. September 19, 2011. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
- ^ a b Parwine Hamandi (October 1, 2015). "World's Largest Arabic Web Encyclopedia Gets $1.5M Investment". ArabNet. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
- ^ Alexa: Mawdoo3.