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There are now one million articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia.

The Portuguese-speaking Wikipedia volunteer community is extremely proud of this achievement and is celebrating in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, and all over the Lusophone world.

The Lusophone community will now start slowly moving towards two million articles, but emphasis among the thirty thousand-strong community, three thousand of which with more than five edits a month, is turning towards quality over quality.

Articles created by bots (software that can easily make thousands of dull and repetitive tasks on Wikipedia, including the creation of simple articles) are no longer a staple of the Portuguese Wikipedia. In fact, there is currently a bot that is slowly redirecting about thirty thousand short articles about asteroids, created by one other such bot more than ten years ago, to little more than one hundred lists. No information is being lost, but convenience for readers is greatly increased.

The community is also thinking of ways to boost quality by improving the path towards featured articles. Of the million articles in the encyclopedia today, only a bit over two thousand have been reviewed and rated by Wikipedia editors as “good” or “featured,” markers of high quality.  Another 500 list articles boost those numbers slightly. One proposal currently underway is the resurrection of the “peer review” process to ensure articles are properly evaluated before getting this “gold star” and featuring on the main page of the Portuguese Wikipedia.

There are also a number of initiatives to diversify contributors to the site, which as in many other language versions is heavily biased towards men and inhabitants of richer nations. Besides participating in international drives to increase coverage and depth of articles on women—such as “A Mulher que você nunca conheceu” or “Arte+Feminismo”, organised by Wikimedia Portugal and groups in Brazil—there are also ongoing projects to increase participation from people in Portuguese speaking countries in Africa, such as the Guiné-Bissau project.

A further challenge to the Wikipedia movement in Lusophone countries, as many in the community are undoubtedly aware, has been of building a sustainable organization to support the activities of the thousands of editors. The still-recent de-recognition of the two Brazilian user groups as Wikimedia affiliates will certainly have an impact for the years to come, and is a culmination of long term and serious disagreements between members of the two groups. The situation in Portugal, meanwhile, had been stagnant for several years. (People who attended the Wikimedia Conference in Milan in 2013 might remember my extremely short presentation on the state of the Portuguese chapter at the time.) However, this year we have participated in more activities than the last four years combined, and if it depends on the people currently active in the Portuguese chapter you can be certain of many more to come.

After all, one million articles do not write themselves. Congratulations to all that have contributed to this landmark, no matter how large or small those contributions may have been—and to many more articles to come!

Gonçalo Themudo, President
Wikimedia Portugal

Photo by Zack McCune/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Last month, the Mexican Ministry of Culture and Wikimedia Mexico formally agreed to a long-term partnership that will help collect and preserve Mexican culture and heritage on Wikimedia projects, like Wikipedia.

The possibilities of this agreement—signed between the Mexican government agency charged with overseeing the country’s centers of history and heritage, and the independent chapter working to advance the Wikimedia movement in Mexico—are far-reaching. Mexico has an extensive and diverse history and culture, reaching back thousands of years in Spanish and dozens of indigenous languages, but much remains undigitized.

“We are excited to continue to expand Wikipedia’s free knowledge alongside one of the leading keepers of culture in my country,” says Iván Martínez, President of Wikimedia Mexico. “I genuinely appreciate the willingness and work of everyone who made this possible, and thank them all for their sensitivity, vision, and now commitment to continuing the production of free knowledge in Mexico.”

Since being incorporated in 2011, Wikimedia Mexico has been one of the most active and engaging chapters in the Wikimedia movement. Their activities include hosting Wikimania in 2015, the annual conference that celebrates Wikipedia and the movement; and a partnership with the ministry’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos Public Library, which served as a first step to the formal agreement and will be continuing, in addition to existing agreements with the Digital Culture Center (Centro de Cultura Digital), the National Film Archives (Cineteca Nacional), and the National Sound Archives (Fonoteca Nacional).

In the near future, the chapter is planning to expand this work through an advisory role in the new Cultural Database of Cultural Objects of Mexico with Wikidata, and the launch of a national photography contest dedicated to the culture of Mexico.

To celebrate the formal agreement, the Mexican consulate in San Francisco held an official signing event on 12 March. In attendance were Gemi González, Consul of Mexico in San Francisco; Alejandro Salafranca, General Manager of Information Technology and Communications of the Culture Ministry; Ernesto Miranda, Coordinator of Digital Agenda in the Secretariat of Culture; Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation; and Iván Martínez.

The Wikimedia Foundation signed onto the agreement to confirm support to the chapter’s commitment. Moreover, the foundation’s Partnerships and Global Reach team has been invited to participate as a way of furthering the chapter’s extensive efforts and to have a stake in supporting the partnership.

At the event, Martínez spoke about the path ahead and what it is going to mean for the participants (condensed for this format):

I cannot speak for my tens of thousands of comrades who create and curate Wikipedia’s knowledge, but in my own Wikipedia activity, two of the skills I employ most frequently are patience and resignation.

Patience comes because knowledge is commitment. On Wikipedia, for example, editors commit to its cultural creation process. Pursuing a consensus solution, finding a rare citation, or programming an automated program can take days, weeks, or even years.

Resignation is more complex. That is inspired by Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, who once wrote that we live in constant resignation of having to choose the books we read because life will not be long enough to read them all. And so it is with Wikipedia. My presence, and that of all the other editors on the site, will in the end be merely temporary. I’m resigned to knowing that I will never cover everything I want to.

I feel that both of these skills will be useful in this partnership as well. That patience will help me in the extensive work that lies ahead in bolstering the world’s free and open knowledge with information from the Ministry of Culture, and that resignation will help me face the fact that this important work will extend beyond all of our lifetimes.

———

Jorge Vargas, Regional Manager, Strategic Partnerships – Latin America
Wikimedia Foundation

You can also read this post on our Medium publication.