Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Loves Women

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

• There are fewer Africa-based Wikipedians across the entire continent than in Hong Kong alone.
• African subjects are chronically underrepresented on Wikipedia, and articles relating to African women especially.
• By 2030, there will be 490 million more people in Africa, each deserving access to free knowledge and representation on Wikipedia.

How does Wiki Loves Women approach this problem?

• Hold Edit-a-thons and other information-contribution events to make African women’s experience more visible.
• Create and strengthen relationships between gender-focused culture and civil society organisations.
• Encourage women to be involved as leaders, editors, and partners in documenting their history and experience.
• Encourage the growth of Wikimedia groups, and ensure that all editors are aware of gender issues and focuses.
• Organize regular global drives to raise awareness and facilitate participation.
• Train women in leadership.

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:

• #SheSaid on WikiQuote: The goal is to create entries about notable women on all language Wikiquote platforms. - get involved here
• During international women’s month:

• ISA campaign Tell Us About Her - Theme will be Women at work. The Isa is a multilingual, mobile-first 'micro contributions' tool, that makes it easy for people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons.
• Support for WikiGap Nigeria

• Coached training of communities members with a Focus Group, in a minimum of 3 countries
• Train-the-trainer MOOC: a skills transfer programme to sustainably build a gender-equity programme with in the Wikimedia communities
• #InspiringWomen podcasts: interviewing and celebrating local notable women and WM organisers

More info on

• Our website : http://www.wikiloveswomen.org
• On Facebook page (public) : https://www.facebook.com/WikiLovesWomen/
• On Facebook group (restricted access)
• On Twitter : http://www.twitter.com/wikiloveswomen

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:

• #SheSaid on Wiki Quote
• Coached training of communities in a minimum of 3 countries
• Train-the-trainer MOOC: a skills transfer programme to sustainably build a gender-equity programme with in the Wikimedia communities
• #InspiringWomen podcasts: interviewing and celebrating local notable women and WM organisers

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:

• 1st place, User:Killy95 who linked 34,087 !!! descriptions
• 2nd place is User:Rwebogora who linked 18,018 descriptions
• 3rd place is User:Farida Takenzo who linked 2709 descriptions
• 4th place is User:Magotech
• 5th place is User:Kunokuno

1. ISA campaign Tell Us About Her

The theme for the Wiki Loves Women's March drive this year is Women at work aimed at adding relevant Wiki-data linked information to the images depicting women at work. The campaign and results are available on the ISA challenges page. The Isa is a multilingual, mobile-first 'micro contributions' tool, that makes it easy for people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons.

2. WikiGap and Wikimedia Foundation Nigeria Inc's International Women's Day Conference

IWD Conference by the Wikimedia Foundations Nigeria Inc in collaboration with the Embassy of Sweden. Held on Monday, 8th of March, Wiki In Africa's Isla Haddow-Flood presented Mind the Gender Gap on Wikipedia about the impact of the Gender-Gap across the Wikimedia movement and what the movement is doing about it.

A Wiki Loves Women prize has been offered to winners of the writing drive being held across Nigeria.

3. Gender Gap portal

Using social media to highlight other opportunities to be involved in content creation about women through March, as detailed on a collaborative Gender Gap events page.

Launched in October 2020, the #SheSaid campaign on Wikiquote has been an amazing success! Across 7 languages, by the 5th January, it resulted overall in 867 new or improved articles (the majority new). Italian Wikiquote was the clear language winner (405 articles) with Ukraine (187) and French (106) coming not so close behind. And let's not forget the great work done on the Spanish, English, Serbian etc. wikiquotes. Congrats to us all ! All results on the #SheSaid meta page.

Please consider the campaign is on-going (there is still much work to do...) :) Please keep contributing quotes from women !

Anthere (talk)

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-going: #SheSaid on WikiQuote: The goal is to create entries about notable women on all language Wikiquote platforms. - get involved here - there will be flash focuses throughout the year.
• March - international women’s month:

• ISA campaign Tell Us About Her - Theme will be Women at work. The Isa is a multilingual, mobile-first 'micro contributions' tool, that makes it easy for people to add structured data to images on Wikimedia Commons.
• Support for WikiGap Nigeria

• June onwards:

• Coached training of communities in a minimum of 3 countries
• Train-the-trainer MOOC: a skills transfer programme to sustainably build a gender-equity programme with in the Wikimedia communities
• #InspiringWomen podcasts: interviewing and celebrating local notable women and WM organisers

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:

• On the English Wikiquote main page on 6th of Oct 2020, in the Selected people section... 29 men are featured and only 4 women (check out the screenshot on the right...)
• There are 233 women who have a featured article on either French or English Wikipedias... with no entry on the French Wikiquote check it out
• There are 141 women featured article on the English Wikipedia with no wikiquote entry check it
• There are 519 women listed on the French wikiquote check it and 3117 men listed check it out

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.

Islahaddow (talk)

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

Anthere (talk)

Tell Us More About Her Results

• 1519 descriptions added to 1782 images by 14 contributors.
• Winners: 1st place: User:Wikinade; 2nd place: User:Gamaliel; 3rd place: User:Vanotchere - Congratulations to them all!! Isla Haddow (talk) 10:49, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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.

• 
  Group Photo of #1Lib1Ref May 2019 - Uganda
• 
  Introduction to the campaign
• 
  One of the participants

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=&lang=&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.

Click Here for More Info

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.

Click here for more details

• Wiki Loves Women in Ghana
• Wiki Loves Women in Nigeria
• Wiki Loves Women in Tanzania
• Wiki Loves Women in Uganda
• WikiGap 2018 in Zimbabwe with Wiki Loves Women (photographs on Commons)

Wiki Loves Women Project on French Wikipedia

• Wiki Loves Women in Cameroon (in French)
• Wiki Loves Women in Cote d'Ivoire (in French)

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

• ISA campaign Tell Us About Her (2021)
• #SheSaid campaign (2020)
• Tell Us About Her campaign (2020)
• #19Women in Sport (2019)
• #18Women Occupation Drive (2018)
• #17African feminists (2017)
• #16WikiWomen Translation Drive (2016)
• #15Challenge Concours d’écriture (2015)

Collaborations with other projects:

• WikiGap Nigeria Online Challenge (2020)
• African Occupations, AfroCine drive (2018)
• The Africa Destubathon (2016)

Articles to create

• Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Women/Suggested articles

Articles to translate from other languages

• Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Women/Suggested articles to translate
• Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Women/African feminists
• Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Women/Feminists to translate

Archived tasks efforts

• Wikipedia:Under-representation of science and women in Africa: Wikimania 2018 an opportunity to bridge the gap
• Wikipedia:Writing about women

• user:Shoodho (Candy Khohliwe)
• user:Anthere (Florence Devouard)
• user:Tochiprecious (Tochi Precious)
• user:ola.mahadi (Ola Mahadi)
• user:Islahaddow (Isla Haddow-Flood)
• user:Sichelesile (Sichelesile Similo Ndlovu)
• user:ChabbieCee (Morleen C Bortman)
• user:Cmwaura (Caroline Mwaura)
• user:Kolobetsoo (Oteng Tiro S. Kolobetso)
• user:Serieminou (Minette Lontsie)
• user:Cnyirahabihirwe123 (Clementine Nyirahabihirwe)
• user:FaithMwanyolo (Faith Mwanyolo)

Please add your username to the list below.
Please keep it in alphabetical order.

• Alice Kibombo (talk)
• Anthere (talk)
• Bukulu Steven (talk)
• Celestinesucess (talk) 12:05, 3 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• DaSupremo (talk) 23:29, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Elisha Owusu (talk) 10:25, 3 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Faintsmoke (talk)
• Flixtey (talk) 19:02, 14 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Iddy John (talk)
• Isla Haddow (talk) 19:01, 3 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Joy Agyepong (talk) 18:18, 3 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Maryam Mgonja (talk)
• MauraWen (talk) 09:46, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Mcwamcwa (talk)
• Mkdw ^talk 19:19, 17 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Mlajum (talk)
• Narraharon (talk · contribs)
• Oaktree b (talk) 15:55, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Olaniyan Olushola (talk) 08:56, 4 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Wilson Oluoha (talk)
• Raphael Berchie (talk)Rberchie (talk) 14:08, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Sam/Jamie Tubers (talk) 02:35, 7 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• SuperSwiftSuperSwift (talk) 00:47, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Sydney Poore/FloNight♥♥♥♥ 23:39, 3 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Stella/SAgbley(talk)16:24, 13 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Shahadu Sadik /Shahadusadik(talk)16:24, 13 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Hmlarson (talk) 19:17, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• —Oluwa2Chainz »» (talk to me) 06:46, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Serenesage (talk)
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• Chabota Kanguya (talk) 13:23, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Aboubacarkhoraa (talk) 18:27, 9 novembre 2018 (UTC)
• Fatimah (talk) 18:27, 9 novembre 2018 (UTC)
• sagesse de sagessee (talk) 18:27, 9 novembre 2018 (UTC)
• Independantee (talk) 18:27, 9 novembre 2018 (UTC)
• Antoni Mtavangu Jadnapac (talk) 11:11, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Lajmmoore (talk) 22:46, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Ampimd (talk) 22:05, 6 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Wil540 art (talk) 19:33, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Naidasrep (talk)

• The Wiki Loves Women website
• Wiki Loves Women on Facebook
• Wiki Loves Women on Twitter
• Wiki Loves Women on Youtube
• (En) and (Fr) Mind the Gap / Attention au fossé
• Category: Wiki Loves Women (Commons)
• Wiki Loves Women Project on French Wikipedia