Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation has said that the Hausa language topped the list of articles created by language category on Wikipedia women writing contest.
Mr Olushola Olaniyan, Chairman, the board of trustees of Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation disclosed this on Monday in Lagos.
Olaniyan said that 179 contents were written in the Hausa language, followed by English with 136.
Olaniyan said that Indonesia’s contents were 122, Yoruba 70, Igbo 30, Bangali 22, French 22, Malayalam five, and Deutch two.
He said that the writing contest took place between April 29 and May 27.
“As of today, Wikipedia, the world’s most visited online encyclopedia is written in over 300 languages and has over six million articles on English Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia has represented an imbalance in the number of women to men contents since the inception of the platform in 2001.
“Statistics shows that only two out of every 10 articles on English Wikipedia are about women, hence the need for a drive to change this narrative,’’ he said.
Olaniyan said that the story of Nigerian women’s digital coverage was quite similar to the pattern obtained from global statistics with over two thousand biographies covered.
“The wikiGap Nigeria online contest was deployed to achieve three cardinal objectives which include identification of training needs of Nigerian women and the deployment of a capacity development programme with a focus on digital content creation.’’
Another objective is the identification and fixing of various issues on existing biographies about women on Wikipedia.
Identification of remarkable women from Nigeria without a Wikipedia biography and profiling their content on Wikipedia is the third objective.
Olaniyan said that the highlights of the project include over 30 local and international Wikipedia editors contributed to the project.
He said that over 150 Nigerian women biographies created could be accessed in English, French, Deutsch, Bangali, Indonesia, Malayalam, Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo languages.
The board chairman said that WikiGap was an initiative taken to close the gender gap and other diversity gaps on Wikipedia.
He said that the initiative was made possible with the cooperation between the Embassy of Sweden in Nigeria, African Women in the Media (AWIM), and Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation Incorporation.
(NAN)