Islamabad :More than 40 volunteers both men and women gathered at a Swedish Embassy event to add more content to Wikipedia about Pakistani women.
The organisers said Wikipedia was the world’s largest online and user-generated encyclopaedia and the first port of call for those in search of information about a famous person or historical event but it’s currently far from equal. They said there were four times more articles about men than women and around 90 per cent of those who wrote articles on Wikipedia were men. According to the organisers, it’s obviously an inaccurate reflection of women’s achievements - and it has to change.
In this light, the Embassy of Sweden held the WikiGap in partnership with Digital Rights Foundation, Media Matters for Democracy, and UN Women. The volunteers created 50 new articles on notable Pakistani women and topics relating to women’s rights, such as women CEOs, entrepreneurs, lawyers, athletes, and models. New articles were about Rafia Qaseem Baig, the first Pakistani woman to enrol in the bomb disposal unit, Kanwal Ahmed, the founder of one of Pakistan’s largest female online groups, Soul Sisters, Munizae Jahangir, a journalist, and Zainab Abbas, Pakistani cricket commentator and sports analyst. “The purpose of organising the event is to empower women to claim their entitled role in the public sphere. Let’s work together to close the internet gender gap,” said Swedish Ambassador Ingrid Johansson. She said the event was part of the global WikiGap campaign, originally launched by Wikimedia Sweden and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The organisers said around 60 countries had so far taken part in WikiGap, while more than 1,800 participants had added or updated more than 13, 000 Wikipedia articles on prominent women in more than 30 different languages. The volunteers said they were happy to create content and play a small role in improving gender parity.
