The Quest to Close the Gender Gap on Wikipedia Continues; Five-Year Anniversary with Feminism & Folklore
Over the years closing the gap on articles by women and about women has been a “goose chase”. We constantly ask ourselves who is missing out or which topic hasn’t been covered yet? The role of feminism plays a significant role and can never be left unattended.
Feminism and Folklore, a writing contest hosted on Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia, in over 35 languages, is intended to constantly increase collaboration spanning different communities across the Wikimedia ecosystem which includes and not limited to writers, curators and creatives around the world to make Wikipedia rich with diverse content. In the last four years, Feminism and Folklore stats are astounding, with over 16326 articles created in 27 languages made by 552 editors.
What does this mean to us?
As a multilingual Wikipedia contest to the Commons contest thus “Wiki Loves Folklore”, we chose to place the project on meta allowing inter wikis, inter-lingual and inter-project cooperation, to foster the true aspect of our global wiki love movement.
We believe that our success in implementing Feminism and Folklore has provided an avenue for the local folklore enthusiasts and conservationists to document their local rituals, folk cultural activities, and songs improving the coverage on various cultures and new forms of heritage that haven’t otherwise been documented so far.
According to IWDAs article on gender and development, feminism paves way for all genders to have an equal right and access to opportunities. The need to respect diverse women’s experiences, their backgrounds, identities, strengths, weaknesses, knowledge, skills and cultural tangible and intangible heritage sites and artefacts remains unchanged. Hence the need for us to whip up the interest and have this contest running to project who or what is missing in the folklore jurisdiction.
The next steps are easy and we are here for you along the way.
We wish to share that this year’s contest still pushes on to close the gender gap even together for better. There are local and international awards for the winning contributors. More information can be found on the contest’s meta-page. We are calling on all feminist groups, institutions, folklore partners and the ever growing Wikimedia ecosystem to join us from February 1 to March 31, 2023.
Is your community or region on board yet? Signup here
Footnotes
- All the media above is available under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license free for use with appropriate attribution to the author with the same copyright license.
- IWDA article https://iwda.org.au/learn/what-is-feminism/
Joy N.Y. Agyepong is the Outreach Coordinator for Open Heritage Foundation. She has about five years experience in various capacities such as resource coordinating to executive administration to operations management and public outreach in Ghana. She is currently a co-lead with the Wiki Hour Initiative where she focuses on equipping young girls and environmental advocates in the area of open sustainable education and gender bias.
