Fighting gender gap: Wikipedia content richer for 50 prominent Pakistani women

The Swedish embassy in partnership with UN Women Pakistan, the Digital Rights Foundation, and Media Matters for Democracy organised ‘WikiGap’, a two-day event with one goal – to increase the number of women included on Wikipedia, and this way change an inaccurate reflection of women’s achievements. In two days, volunteers created 50 brand new articles about prominent Pakistani women related to women’s rights, entrepreneurship, law, journalism, sports, fashion. It has been noted that despite Wikipedia being the world’s largest ‘online and user-generated’ encyclopaedia it is still challenging, and in some cases impossible, to find even basic information about women  who have contributed to societies on lower or global levels. ‘There are four times more articles about men than women and around 90% of those who write articles on Wikipedia are men. […] Let’s work together to close the internet gender gap.’, said Ingrid Johansson, Swedish Ambassador. This event in Pakistan is organised as a part of the global WikiGap campaign, which so far took place in 60 countries around the world and has resulted in over 27,000 Wikipedia articles on women in over 30 different languages. Activities around the world still continue.