[8][9] In 2003 Rami Tarawneh (Arabic: رامي عوض الطراونة), a Jordanian PhD student in Germany who originated from Zarqa, encountered the English Wikipedia and began to edit content.

In 2004, Bayazid was assigned the SysOp responsibilities and he, with another 5 volunteers, namely Ayman, Abo Suleiman, Mustapha Ahmad and Bassem Jarkas[13] are considered to be the first Arabs to lead the Wikipedia project and they are attributed for working on translating and enforcing the English policies to Arabic.

[10] In 2007 the secret police in an unspecified country detained Tarawneh and demanded that he reveal the IP address of a contributor.

Noam Cohen of The New York Times reported that, to many of the attendees of the 2008 Wikimania conference in Alexandria, Egypt, the "woeful shape of the Arabic Wikipedia has been the cause of chagrin.

[18] More recently, a project named Bayt Alhikma has translated more than 10,000 articles about science and other topics in Arabic.

The number of active users in Arabic Wikipedia is increasing quickly, reaching the 10,000 mark for first time on 10 February 2021.

[19] At Wikimania 2008, Jimmy Wales argued that high-profile arrests like those of Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer could be hampering the development of the Arabic Wikipedia by making editors afraid to contribute.

[23] Among the larger Wikipedias, it has one of the lowest ratios of new editors retention and one of the highest rates of edit reversions.

"[25] The articles often reflect a worldview shaped by the region's religious and political sensitivities, differing significantly from Western perspectives.

The news website Raseef22 criticized Arabic Wikipedia's policies, and said that the project was controlled by prejudiced administrators who reject articles about minorities and women.

The administrators of the Arabic Wikipedia said that the deletion process is a normal procedure and has nothing to do with the subject or targeting specific issues.

In April 2022, the European Union's East StratCom Task Force found that four pro-Russian disinformation news outlets (SouthFront, NewsFront, InfoRos and Strategic Culture Foundation) were referenced in 70 articles of the Arabic Wikipedia.

[31] They wrote: On the English version of Wikipedia, there seems to be a consensus that state-sponsored disinformation sites aren't legitimate sources [...].

One can only guess whether other language versions will follow suit, but there is nothing stopping anyone from launching that debate, pointing out the English Wikipedia example as a best practice.Many people find that the Arabic Wikipedia's credibility is compromised by its lack of secular content and the influence of religious and political motives.

[33] On 11 July 2006, the Saudi government blocked access to Wikipedia and Google Translate for what it said was sexual and politically sensitive content.