The Arabic Wikipedia (Arabic: ويكيبيديا العربية) is the Arabic language version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of January 2020, it has 1,016,152 articles, 1,756,053 registered users and 33,509 files and it is the 15th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 12th in terms of depth among Wikipedias that are above 50,000 articles. It was the first 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. Prior to Wikipedia's update 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.