It could just as easily be argued the other way, I think. It's presumptuous and perhaps insulting to purport to create a biography on a person, under her own name, while merely recounting a single tragic occurrence in her life. Since there is often not enough verifiable information to create a biography, it makes some sense to not assert that Wikipedia is doing so. Moreover... It's generally bad practice to apply principles of search engine optimization to editing an encyclopedia. 

And as for fistula... That article isn't great, I agree. However, vaginal fistulas are not the only or even the most common use of that term. Even in medicine, they are a subset of the broader phenomena. 

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Neotarf <neotarf@gmail.com> wrote:
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, 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. (thx, SV).   Also reference the short article on Fatimata Touré, 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-to-death-for-a-crime-she-didnt-commit-becomes-a-rallying-point-for-activists/


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