Shawshara is a community based project aimed at collecting and documenting all aspects of Arabic music in an online encyclopedia.
Shawshara is set up as a wiki based platform enabling anyone to add and modify the contents of any page, without the interference of site administrators, in order to enrich the content and grow the database.
The site currently contains over 25 Arabic artists, their biographies and discographies that translate into several hundred albums, and over 700 song pages which include the song’s lyrics, lyrics translated into English and other languages, transliteration and videos.
The site interface is presented in both English and Arabic, and so is the content, which is translated and transliterated into English, and in some cases into other languages as well.
Shawshara was founded by Waseem Sayegh, a Palestinian, currently living and studying in Canada.
It is powered by MediaWiki, the same open source software that runs Wikipedia.