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Wiki Loves Women in brief: Freeing access to information on African women
WikiProject Wiki Loves Women seeks to fill two major subject gaps – women and Africa – on the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia. These gaps exist both in content on these two themes, but also in terms of participation in the editorial level. Our objective is the fight against the existing inequalities between men and women on the African continent.
The project is designed to leverage Wikipedia’s role as a global repository for the dissemination of information to achieve accessible and fair online representation of notable women in countries in Africa. It encourages the contribution of existing researched and verified information by civil society organisations to Wikipedia with the intent of redressing the systemic bias online about women. The donated data and content specifically focuses on women’s contribution to the political, economic, scientific, cultural and heritage landscape, as well as the current socio-political status of women in each country that it is instigated.
Did you know that only 0.318% of all Wikidata biographical entries are about African women? Furthermore, of all biographies about African people on Wikipedia, only 17.9% are about women.
African Representation on Wikipedia at a Glance
How does Wiki Loves Women approach this problem?
The Wiki Loves Women project initially aimed to release and make widely available cultural and educational content on, or related to women, to the general public. It quickly also included women recruitment and training. The project works with organisations and public institutions to draw their existing information onto Wikipedia, and via this platform be made available to millions of people every day. In 2016-2017 the project was run in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and was active on the ground in four West African countries: Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria. Following successes in Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Nigeria, Wiki Loves Women celebrated women’s achievements in two new African nations: Uganda and Tanzania, with the support of Wikimedia Foundation.
What to expect from Wiki Loves Women in 2021
For 2021 we have a project plan jam-packed with exciting new elements that build on Wiki Loves Women’s success so far. You can read the full strategy behind our gender-equity engagements over 2021 here.
Over the year, we will be focusing on the following:
More info on
Launched in May 2021 the Wiki Loves Women Focus Group Members programme is a practical, action-oriented, mentored online training programme that provides skills and knowledge transfer that is specifically designed to support community leaders as they create gender-equity programmes and drives within the Wikimedia and Open movements. Planning to hold the following initiatives:
The Focus Group has the following Members.
Results of the Women At Work Drive on the ISA Tool
The Tell Us About Her : Women at Work drive on the ISA Tool saw 16295 images being described by 29, who posted 87,787 descriptions!!!
The top 5 contributors were:
1. ISA campaign Tell Us About Her
2. WikiGap and Wikimedia Foundation Nigeria Inc's International Women's Day Conference
3. Gender Gap portal
Please consider the campaign is on-going (there is still much work to do...) :) Please keep contributing quotes from women !
For 2021 we have a project plan jam-packed with exciting new elements that build on Wiki Loves Women’s success so far. You can read the full strategy behind our gender-equity engagements over 2021 here.
Over the year, we will be focusing on the following:
On the 20th October, at the Gender Gap panel for the Creative Commons Virtual Global Summit, the SheSaid campaign was launched. The SheSaid drive is aimed at improving the visibility of women across Wikimedia projects by creating new or improving already existing Wikiquote entries that are related to them.
Why the SheSaid campaign? One reason is to balance the representation of gender in the entries of Wikiquote. The other is to show that women's quotes are less likely to be featured than men's. Here are a few statistics:
Obviously, not all women say good quotes that would make a wikiquote entry worth it. Still...
SheSaid runs until the 20h of December 2020. We hope you will take part! Find out more and join the campaign here.
The Wiki Loves Women initiative is celebrating Africa’s women leaders throughout March 2020 with the Tell Us About Her drive on the ISA tool. The drive is aimed at improving the visibility of political leaders and activists across Africa on Wikimedia projects. If you do not know it yet, the ISA tool is a fun and mobile friendly tool that helps you to add better descriptions onto the photographs uploaded to Wikimedia Commons within selected categories, so that they are more useful on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Information added to the image description is structured data (depicts or captions). Categories I chose for this campaign are related to politicians, activists and in particular feminists from Africa.
I invite you to check out what the ISA tool is (if you have not yet done so during previous drives). And I of course invite you to join and help add structured data information on our ISA current campaign Tell Us about Her.
Any additional question you have about ISA, just ask me.
Play here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/isa/campaigns/53
Tell Us More About Her Results
We committed to participating in the # 1Lib1Ref May 2019 campaign and what better way to contribute than providing citations for articles on women that had been created in the course of the Wiki Loves Women Project in Uganda?
The event took place on Saturday 1st June at the Goethe-Zentrum Kampala Library and was facilitated and attended by librarians. Through the course of their work and studies, the participants were well-versed with bibliographic concepts which made this one of the most enjoyable edit-a-thons to date. We used a number of existing resources but most helpful was a pre-populated list of articles on women that had been flagged for lack of citation / poor citation in whole or in part.
Since the most basic aim is to improve the quality of existing articles by providing relevant citation, each of the participants was able to contribute over and above our target.
Finally we are here!
We are both excited happy and sad that we have closed one of the cool project ever done in Tanzania as we got used to host and have fun in writing, collaborating and facilitating Wiki Loves Women. We are happy that many volunteers who participated from the beginning, partners and without forgetting notable women did show up. We had a great time concluding the project as we had a chance to reflect and look back where we came from since the first event on September 2018 to the finale (10th) event on April 2019. One of the inspiring moments was listening to the Wiki Loves Women project founders (Isla and Florence) VIDEO they send us, on that Video they explained on how did they come up with the idea of Wiki Loves Women Project. Participants were given a chance to listen to the video, then a number of follow up questions about Wiki Loves Women was asked and the respondents to the questions who was given some gifts.
At the end we had the cool individual and group photos as well as short video clips featuring what the participant had to say about Wiki Loves Women project in Tanzania. You can find more of the info such as cool photos and timeline events and sessions on our facebook page Here or you can listen to what they had to say Here, Here and Here also
Finally We would like to use this opportunity to give our sincere thanks to both the project directors (Isla and Florence) for their endless support and mentor ship and the Wikimedia Foundation for supporting this project to happen in Tanzania.
This was our 9th event before the last one which will happen on last weekend of this month of April 2019. We asked yourself, why seating down and write only ? How can we make sure there is a room for women to be part of this journey, by inviting them. Her2Her event was designed for a positive purpose, connecting women with other women from different experiences and background, hear out loud their story and their views. Wiki Loves Women is also platform that cares and gives a community a form of investment in the project (Wiki Loves Women ), and how women are viewed and their voices are heard within the society.
We managed to invite six powerful, notable women who are successful within their fields, in many ways, and their impact within the society is seen everyday within Tanzania and beyond.
Over 50 people showed up with rate of 73% number of women.
The event was held on 23rd March and up till then ,we had not facilitated a community-based event. With the help of Kawempe Youth Centre Library staff ,we were able to mobilise quite a number of mainly young people but this also came with its associated challenges .We started with account creation and were ably assisted by individuals who had opened accounts prior to the event as per email instructions.In the course of some very lively discussions ,we discovered that notability and women were perceived differently . We thereafter facilitated sessions on article creation . All in all ,it was a chance to interact with a much younger audience and get to know what they think of such a project and how they think they can contribute to it . It was also an opportunity for us to re-think what our potential target groups could be even beyond this project.
This year we decided to have two wikigap events. A pre event , where we focused on account creation and how to edit on wikipedia. The pre event had new editors who were invited from different faculties but we were hosted by the faculty of Gender studies.It was carried out one week to the main event which was held on 8th march.
The main event hosted new and old editors but we focussed on content generation. We focused on two lists 'women in uganda' created by ALice Kibombo and 'Women in Red' . This gave a good working template for editors who were wondering where to start from. We launched the wikigap competition on that same day . Where we saw three winners , awarded prizes byt the swedish embassy.
We did the 8th Wiki Loves Women event in Tanzania since its Launching in August 2018. With the collaboration between Wiki Loves Women project in Tanzania and WikiWomenTz (WikiGap) organized by the Swedish Embassy in Tanzania.The event was held at the residence of the ambassador for Swedish Embassy in Tanzania and with focus on getting some insights, views ,suggestions on possible ways on how to overcome the Challenge of lack of enough reliable sources to write about Tanzanian women as well as uploading some women bios into Wikipedia.Over 20 notable women living in Dar es Salaam will were invited to attend, and share the journey, success, failure and how they overcome challenges, this also built a good interaction between them and local Tanzania Wikimedians editors.
Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) hosted the Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda for an event at their offices in Kalabagala. It was a very engaging and fun edit-a-thon where we contributed to creating articles on notable women in activism, politics and civil service; the drafts were saved and we all agreed to do more in-depth research on the notable women during the course of the week to improve the articles.
A group of Young students at Makerere University Studying Luganda in the department of Languages came together to honor our invitation to hold a translator-thon. We introduced them to the Special:Content Translation tool. The students took to the tool and the translation was a success. The general feeling was that it was much easier translating online with that tool than going offline to translate content in word documents
In conjunction with High sound Uganda, Wikimedia user group hosted an event that brought together journalist from both print and broadcast media. It was an intense editor-thon where we focused on contributing to the list of notable women in journalism and then finally had an editor-thon where everyone created a draft of a notable woman in Uganda.
In October, we launched our Women occupation label drive.
WikiData (which feeds many Wikipedia articles) hosts a huge list of professional occupation entries... in English. First, those are rarely translated in African languages. Second, in many languages, the word to describe a professional occupation is different for male and for female... So our call was simple... we wanted to get many occupation labels translated in various languages and we would like to have both male and female form available (when relevant). For this, we joined the Wikipedia:WikiProject AfroCine/Months of African Cinema, which run in October and November 2018, and proposed a list of cinema related labels to translate and improve. Outcome was excellent in some languages (such as in Igbo or Swahili, more limited in others (such as in Yoruba), and unfortunately no labels were added in some languages (eg, Lingala, Shona etc.)
Full process and report available here : https://meta.wikimedia.orgview_html.php?sq=Google&lang=en&q=Women_Occupation_Drive
The event brought together Tanzanian Wikimedians and some of the Tanzanian notable women.These notable were given some time to give brief presentation on themselves and shared their opinions on how we can overcome the challenge of "Lack reliable referencing materials to write about Women in Tanzania". One of the many suggested ways was to wide spread the knowledge to Tanzanian women on importance of finding some ways to document what they do such as working closely to journalists.
This was the first Wiki Loves Women event in Tanzania for the year 2019 and the Sixth event since the Launching of Wiki Loves Women project in Tanzania on 2018.This event was focused on going deep on Wikicommons including how to upload files such as photos in it. Part of the this event was to prepare the Tanzanian Wikimedians for the upcoming Wiki Loves Africa 2019.Finally the the participants had a time for hands on step-by-step practice on how to upload photos in Wikicommons.
Wiki Loves Women Project on French Wikipedia
Wiki Loves Women Home | Activities | Global Online Drives | SheSaid | Tell Us About Her Campaign | Working page | Resources | WikiData suggestions | Focus Group |
Wiki Loves Women Online Drives
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Articles to translate from other languages
Archived tasks efforts
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