Articles about women are getting lost. Lost that is, to Google searches.
For the last two days, Afghanistan has been exploding in demonstrations
over Farkhunda, a Kabul woman who was beaten to death and torched by a mob.
Even though every major news source has done a piece on her, I can't find
an article for her yet in Wikipedia. When it does get written, and finally
starts showing up in the search engines, what will it say? "Farkhunda", the
logical search term? Or more likely, the more common format: "the
murder/lynching/battering/victimization/humiliation of [insert woman's name
here]".
For quite some time, the article for Ozgecan Aslan was hidden from Google
searches as well, because due to the English Wikipedia's unique naming
conventions, the article was called "Murder of Özgecan Aslan".
Maybe it's time to reconsider naming articles about women for the horrible
things that were done to them, and give them the simple dignity of their
own names. I'm not sure the victimization narrative is the right one
anyhow. The Farkhunda story seems to be about her death becoming a
rallying point for the way women are treated in Afghanistan, much as Aslan
was in Turkey.
What else? Iraqi lawyer Samira Salih al-Nuaimi still comes up 6th in a
Google search, *after* the entry for the Daily Mail, because of the
idiosyncratic spelling of her name in the article title. But at least you
can find her (very, very short) article now.
And since I've already written this much, the article on fistula
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fistula>, a problem for a huge number of
girls in parts of the Global South, is not very well explained. Compare Female
genital mutilation or even Women's rights in 2014
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Women%27s_rights_in_2014&redirect=no>.
(thx, SV). Also reference the short article on Fatimata Touré
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatimata_Tour%C3%A9>, whose group in Mali
works against fistula.
Note: for Farkhunda, see Twitter photos
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Farkhunda?src=hash and WaPo http://
www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/23/afghan-woman-beaten-t…