During March, the Ukrainian Wikipedia hosted the WikiGap marathon, a campaign aimed at telling the world about prominent women and reducing gender inequality on Wikipedia.
The campaign included an online marathon where in March, Wikipedia users created articles about prominent women. In addition, WikiGap hosted meetings in Kyiv and Mariupol, as well as a nationwide online webinar. According to WikiGap results, 1,850 articles about prominent women and related topics were created or significantly improved on the Ukrainian Wikipedia in just one month.
Statistics show that women account for only about one-seventh of all available biographical articles on the Ukrainian Wikipedia. The goal of the WikiGap project is to combat gender imbalance on Wikipedia and to increase the visibility of women and their contribution to various spheres of life.
As a part of WikiGap, several hundred people joined the creation of the Ukrainian Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the Ukrainian language. "About 245 male and female participants in WikiGap created at least one article on the Ukrainian Wikipedia. 150 people took part in meetings organized within the framework of WikiGap. It is gratifying that more than 100 people seized the opportunity to join the online webinar which we held on March 31,” says Yelizaveta Chekhovska, communications manager in Wikimedia Ukraine public organization.
An important focus of the campaign was not only the number of articles created, but also their quality. Several articles worked out during WikiGap received the status "good", which is granted to the highest-quality articles of the Ukrainian Wikipedia. For example, such articles were written about the Ukrainian public personality and philanthropist of the 17th century Halshka Hulevychivna and the American rock singer Janice Joplin. WikiGap also created an article about the American singer and African-Americans’ rights activist Odette, which became the millionth article on the Ukrainian Wikipedia.
WikiGap held in the Ukrainian Wikipedia is part of the WikiGap international campaign initiated in 2018 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden and Wikimedia Sweden, a non-profit organization. The Ukrainian Wikipedia has traditionally joined WikiGap since the beginning of the project.
This year, the WikiGap 2020 campaign in Ukraine was organized by the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine, public organization Wikimedia Ukraine, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the United Nations Population Fund (with the support of Grammarly Kyiv and Beetroot Academy).