Wikimedia Foundation Celebrates Efforts to Improve Gender Equity in Africa on Wikipedia
- The parent company of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, is organising a campaign to close the gender disparity on Wikipedia
- The foundation said there is insufficient coverage of African women on Wikipedia, thereby creating a wide gulp in knowledge-sharing
- The campaign aims to impact how women are perceived across the world on Wikipedia
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Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, has launched its "Wikipedia Needs More Women" campaign.
The campaign celebrates efforts worldwide, including in Africa, to improve gender equity on Wikimedia projects and invites others to participate.
Source: Getty Images
Understanding gender gaps
As one of the world's most extensive knowledge resources, with 62 million articles in over 300 languages and 15 billion views per month, Wikipedia plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of the world.
Content on Wikipedia is written on notable subjects by over 265,000 volunteer contributors from around the world. These volunteers adhere to Wikipedia's editorial standards, ensuring all information is backed by reliable sources and presented neutrally.
Wikipedia depends on the availability of existing published sources to verify the facts in its articles. But in many places worldwide, women have been left out of historical narratives and traditional sources of knowledge. This gender gap is an all-pervasive issue across the internet.
Many of these knowledge gaps are on Wikipedia, and women remain significantly underrepresented.
"On International Women's Day, the 'Wikipedia Needs More Women' campaign is a call to action for everyone to help close these knowledge gaps on Wikipedia. There are several ways that people can get involved to change the stats and make a difference, from editing a Wikipedia page to attending an online event," said Anusha Alikhan, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Communications Officer.
"We're also calling on journalists, academics, thought leaders, and individuals and organisations across the information landscape to increase their coverage of women. This will help build out the ecosystem of secondary literature that Wikipedia volunteers rely on to create and improve content about women."
How Africa has progressed in closing gender gaps
For many years, the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteers on Wikimedia projects have been making global efforts to address these knowledge gaps and increase the equitable engagement and representation of all people and subjects on Wikipedia and beyond.
According to The Guardian, this month, Wikimedia User Group Nigeria (Wikimedia Nigeria) — a nonprofit organisation committed to promoting free access to knowledge through Wikimedia projects in Nigeria — is leading a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Nigerian women on Wikipedia.
In partnership with the Embassy of Sweden in Nigeria and the Nigeria Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ), Wikimedia Nigeria is organising the WikiGap Nigeria Online Challenge. This challenge is open to the public to create new articles for notable women and improve existing articles about women on Wikipedia, focusing on English, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Tyap Wikipedias.
WikiGap Nigeria Online Challenge begins this month
"The Nigeria Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ) is proud to join forces with Wikimedia Nigeria in their dedicated pursuit of gender equity. By empowering women to contribute to and shape the content on Wikipedia, we are paving the way for a more inclusive and diverse platform for knowledge sharing," said Dr Adeola Ekine, Chairperson of the Nigeria Association of Women Journalists.
The initiative kicked off on International Women's Day, 8 March, with an in-person symposium featuring engaging panel discussions. Following this, on 12 and 13 March, a capacity-building workshop will take place, where the Wikimedia Nigeria team will guide NAWOJ members in utilising and enhancing their understanding of Wikipedia. The campaign will conclude with the Online Challenge from 14 to 31 March.
About the "Wikipedia Needs More Women" campaign
This month, the Wikimedia Foundation's new "Wikipedia Needs More Women" campaign celebrates ongoing efforts, such as the WikiGap Nigeria Online Challenge, to close gender knowledge gaps and the volunteers doing this work. The campaign also calls for everyone to collaborate to increase gender diversity on Wikimedia projects.
Meet Nigeria's top female Bank CEOs
Legit.ng reported that 2021 was the year of corporate women in Nigeria. In that year alone, more women mounted the saddles of top banks in Nigeria than in any other year in history.
About four women emerged and assumed the enviable positions of managing directors/chief executive officers at different banks in Nigeria.
That same year, Nigeria's ex-World Bank Managing Director, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, emerged as the Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
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Source: Legit.ng
