Today, the last day of the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, falls on International Human Rights Day. This is an important reminder that violence against women is a violation of our fundamental human rights.

Once again, we end the 16 days Take Back The Tech campaign with a call to populate wikipedia with women’s rights issues and integrate a gender perspective to its content.

By doing so, we’re doing our bit to ensure that this popular and important repository of information and documented living history does not neglect the specificity of perspectives and knowledge from women’s lives.

Wikipedia is one of the most exciting online collaborative information library in recent times. As a free online encyclopedia, it contains more than 2 million articles since it began in 2001 on a broad range of subjects, and has sparked off many local wikipedia sites in other languages.

Anyone can contribute to wikipedia, and add information or write articles about things that they know of. Because of the open nature of its content building, knowledge is something that is collectively owned, reviewed, and disseminated.

Take back the tech calls you to cast a feminist lens and engage with wikipedia!

  • Go to wikipedia, and search for topics that you are well acquainted with
  • In particular, go through the stubs on violence against women, and add information about your country.
  • For example, under the rape article, create a section on the rape situation in your country, adding links to statistics, debates, legislation etc.
  • Or create a whole new stub about “rape in [your country]”.
  • Don’t forget to cite and add references to what you add.
  • You can change and add to any articles found in Wikipedia when you click on “edit this page”.
  • It’s fairly user-friendly, although you might have to play around with the syntax (language) to familiarise yourself with it.
  • Try it out by using the sandbox
  • You can find out how to add content to wikipedia on the editing tutorial page.
  • You can also create an account to better protect your privacy and gain access to various other functions.
  • Get together with a group of friends, and turn this into a collective initiative.

If you’re feminist-ing wikipedia, leave a comment to start a discussion and help each other out on this action.

Let's keep the activism going strong!