The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was proposed on 30 March 2008 and started as a developing project on 2 April 2008 in the Wikimedia Incubator.

[2][10] On 24 November 2008, the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was officially launched,[3] and the Incubator articles were transferred to the new domain.

That year, Panović wrote that "The number of active contributors is still rather small, yet their entries seem to be growing.

[3] Panović wrote that editors of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia had a tendency of creating new articles "just for the sake of increasing their number in hopes of expanding them later.

[12] About 35% of Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia views come from Egypt, about 11% from the United States and Saudi Arabia, and about 5% from Morocco, Algeria and Iraq.

These editors are part of a larger network actively promoting the notion that Egyptian is not merely a dialect of Arabic but rather a distinct language deserving official recognition.

[2][10][15][22] The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia has been subject to controversy from the start, causing arguments between supporters and opponents.

[29][30][31] As the project developed it was seen occasionally as a manifestation of triglossia of standard Arabic, vernaculars, and a western language in the Arabic section of the cyberspace[32] Amira Samir of the Al-Ahram Hebdo reported that some Egyptians on the internet did not have a problem with the project, arguing that the Wikimedia Foundation was an independent body and therefore the Egyptian government could not force the inclusion or exclusion of any particular dialect.

[2] The primary criticism of the Wikipedia Masry involves the belief that a "degradation" of Arabic occurred when someone writes in a dialect.

Panović argues that the criticism is "grounded in folk belief about language" and therefore it is a "futile task" to examine the arguments from a linguistic point of view.