From February 6-12, the fifth Campus Party Brasil took place, hosted in São Paulo, and we (the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Brasil) had the great opportunity to represent the Brazilian Wikimedia community through our attendance. Fifteen volunteers from the community got tickets to attend and worked alongside Kul Wadhwa, Pats Peña, and me (Jessie Wild), who came in from San Francisco. We had and accomplished a few specific goals:

• Motivate Brazilians towards collaborative knowledge! Kul gave a keynote presentation which highlighted the importance of asking why you are choosing the direction of your life.
  

  Wikimedia Brasil @ Campus Party

• Determine the plausibility of a MediaWiki Hackathon in Brazil! The verdict: we should do it! There is obviously a lot of interest across communities in Brazil, and Pats, Mateus, Jonas, and others helped network with key organizations and development communities which were also present at the event. They got many tips, formed some collaborative partnerships, and raised awareness for the upcoming event. So get your hacker-hands ready and stay tuned for details…
• Recruit new editors and member for Wikimedia Brasil! The volunteers led a “Mutirão,” or an activity designed to teach people how to set-up a user account and do a quick one hour editing sprint. As a result, we had three winners who contributed to articles which are part of the “Grand Prix” editing sprint currently taking place on the Portuguese Wikipedia, and were awarded T-shirts.

In addition to the above, we were all able to make a lot of new friends! We had the privilege of sharing a table with the Mozilla community and the Garoa Hacker Club community (we also adopted one Angry Bird). This led to great connections for us all, and we are excited about the potential to work together more, as compatible communities going forward.

Sleepy

There are certainly things we can improve on. Primarily, though we had a lot of volunteers sign up for tickets, unfortunately not all came or did not participate in the outreach event. Next time, it may help us to be more explicit in the different roles each of us can have in supporting Wikipedia/Wikimedia while at the conference, so that everyone knows how they are to be involved in promoting Wikipedia.

But – all in all, another great event in São Paulo (although very exhausting)…

Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development

(For the Portuguese version, please see the Wikimedia Brazil site.)

It was during Wikimania 2011, in a small restaurant in Haifa, when the news was announced: the largest popular computer manufacturer in Brazil, Grupo Positivo, is interested in installing an offline Portuguese Wikipedia version in their products. All of us from Wikimedia Brazil who were present got excited because of the tremendous potential of such a distribution in spreading the free encyclopedia and its mission around Brazil. In other words, this meant the Portuguese Wikipedia for approximately 13% of the national market of personal computers and with a greater penetration in the lower-income strata.

Despite the good news, a race against time began. It was necessary to prepare the offline version of the Portuguese Wikipedia, with 5000 articles of good quality, within a very short time: March 2012. The challenge was huge and to overcome it we needed to step on the gas.

The list of 5000 articles which were critical to include in the offline version was created in only three months, with the great assistance of Wikimedia Brazil volunteers. But the volunteers found that the quality of these articles still was not high enough: they were in desperate need of improvement before being taken offline. It was then we had the idea of hosting our own “Grand Prix” – like the famous auto race. No cars and no laps, but with articles to be improved and many awards for the “pilots” who accept this challenge. Thus began the “I GP Wikimedia Brazil,” where each improved article is a completed lap.

The take-off will begin in January 2012, and it is very easy to attend! Just subscribe to one of the existing teams or join a new team. The registration will last until January 7. At the moment of publishing this blog, we have 51 subscribers divided into 15 teams, but the goal is to have at least 100 participants. After all, this is a Grand Prix where everyone wins!

Prizes will be distributed as teams improve the quality of the articles included in the list. There are buttons, stickers, notebooks and t-shirts with the brand of Wikipedia, as well as trophies and medals on the userpages of the participants. The rules of the award will be released soon after the formation of the teams, but we know that the biggest prize is the offline version of Wikipedia in Portuguese!

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Imagine, now, a Brazil where thousands of people – some of them even without access to Internet – will share a little sum of this knowledge. This is what we will do. Join a team and participate of this Grand Prix too!

(Written by the Wikimedia Brasil Community)

Barry Newstead and I (from the Foundation’s Global Development Department) had the thrill of going to visit our friends in Brazil over October 7-10: what an awesome country and community! We had two stops this time: Rio de Janeiro, to participate in an all-day event at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), and São Paulo, to participate in a community meet-up (WikiSampa10) and present at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). The trip centered around two key themes from our end: research and university outreach.

Research regarding Portuguese Wikipedia
During the trip, we were able to present some preliminary analysis regarding the Portuguese Wikipedia (PT-WP) and brainstorm about some causes for its current state. PT-WP shows a high turnaround, with about 40% of editors in a given month
consisting of newcomers, and in addition scored lowest on the Wikipedia Editor Satisfaction Index” (for more information on the index, see past blog post).  Daniela Feijo – a researcher out of Porto Alegre, Brazil – has been working with WMF for the past month and lead the discussion on some preliminary thoughts regarding possible reasons for this.

Conversation is ongoing and following WikiSampa10, it continues on the PT-WP Village Pump. Moreover, research is ongoing and can be tracked on the Meta Wiki as well as PT-WP.

Beginnings of Global Education Program – Brazil
It has been clear that the youth of Brazil will be the catalysts for growth in the country at large, and we want Wikipedia to benefit from the passion and intelligence of this demographic as well! To that end, we are thrilled at the Education Program currently occurring at UNIRIO, which involves the incorporation of editing Wikipedia into the class syllabus for two different courses: Roman History and Multimedia Systems.

In addition to supporting the work of the currently ongoing courses, we were eager to present the idea to new schools, and we spent Monday afternoon under the hospitality of USP. We are excited about the potential of working with them in the future.

Further work
Though the work was pushed forward, there is still much to do! As mentioned above, we are pushing forward on the research and Education Program support, but the Brazilian community is working on some really cool initiatives themselves, including the development of a chapter and conducting an Editing Sprint! Stay tuned for the exciting things to come…

The Wikimedia Foundation is thrilled to announce the sponsorship of 77 full scholarship recipients and 52 partial scholarship recipients for the 2011 Wikimania!  Wikimania – an entirely community driven conference since 2005 – is an important annual event for the Wikimedia movement, bringing together Wikimedia advocates from all around the globe for four days. We are proud to be able to facilitate the attendance of representatives from different countries, chapters, languages and/or projects at this international conference.

Scholars were selected based on their (a) activity on Wikimedia projects, (b) activity in compatible projects outside of Wikimedia, and (c) future goals for participation in the Wikimedia movement. A group of nine volunteers formed the scholarship review committee, which pored over the more than 1100 applications in order to select a diverse pool of candidates, with the following goals in mind:

• Make Wikimania 2011 a successful and productive international conference
• Support the Wikimedia projects by encouraging participation
• Enrich the conference with attendance by a diverse group of participants in the Wikimedia movement

This year’s group of full scholars represents the most diverse we have ever had! Female scholarship recipients are up to 18% of the total full scholarships, and 53% of full scholarship recipients hail from the Global South (representing 62% of the funding). Moreover, recipients are coming from all regions of the world.

Of course, the selection of these individuals has been made possible only thanks to the dedicated scholarship review committee as well as the generosity of Wikimedia Germany, which donated directly to the funds. In addition, a variety of other chapters has generously provided self-administered scholarships, opening the opportunities for participation even more.

We are delighted to sponsor such a passionate and diverse group of individuals who not only have demonstrated commitment to our projects in the past, but who also are committed to the future of the Wikimedia movement. We anticipate great things from the conference!

At the end of June 2011, we had the opportunity to visit Brazil as part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Brazil Catalyst Project – a project designed to develop open and collaborative approaches by which the Wikimedia Foundation can support the growth of the Wikimedia community in Brazil. Brazil is a priority country for the Wikimedia movement, both for contributions to Portuguese and other Wikimedia projects and for the opportunity to connect with millions of potential readers who are coming online.

Our visit involved a variety of meetings ranging from community gatherings to exploration of business partnerships to presentations at one of the biggest international conferences focused on free software (FISL); the whole agenda and supporting information can be seen on the Brazil Catalyst Project metawiki page. We spent most of the time listening and learning about Brazil and the Brazilian Wikimedia community. It was incredibly valuable to hear from a variety of people and we hope to continue the dialogue.

Sao Paulo: WikiSampa 8
Paulistas have been gathering periodically under the banner of WikiSampa for years, and we were fortunate to get a nice group together on a bank holiday. The group ran the gamut in depth of wiki experience: wiki newcomers sat alongside long time editors,  admins, and community members to share their experiences with Wikipedia and discuss the health and future of Wikipedia in Brazil. We spent about six hours together including a relaxed dinner at a local pizzeria.

As with every community gathering around the world, we were in awe of the positive spirit, dedication and friendliness. We were reminded again that, as Jimmy likes to say, Wikipedians are just “nice people.” We also heard about the struggles in the community. We heard the word “conflito” a lot as the more experienced editors all shared a concern that the Portuguese Wikipedia community has an over-abundance of conflict between editors and that the community needs to find ways to refocus away from fighting. We are not yet clear on the causes of the conflict or if PT:WP is worse that others, but there was a clear sense from those in attendance that they need to find new ways of working together so that new contributors will feel welcome and experienced contributors stay active and energized to continue building a great Wikipedia.

For more pictures see: Category:8_WikiSampa_June_2011, and for the official community page (in Portuguese) see: WikiSampa8.

Rio de Janeiro: first broad community meet-up!

Rio meet-up

Seven Cariocas began what we hope is a regular community gathering in Rio de Janeiro. This group brought fresh faces and minds eager to contribute to the sum of all knowledge. The excitement of the possible future of the RJ community specifically and Brazil at large was palpable: one professor in attendance is now planning to incorporate Wikipedia-editing into a university seminar course! She already has a blog just focused on this experience. A long time Wikipedian and self-proclaimed Wiki-addict met other Wikipedians for the first time and shared his experiences as an editor primarily on English Wikipedia.

Our conversation in RJ focused on the potential of Wikipedia as we had a number of newer community members. They were interested in exploring new ways to bring people into the community. One interesting theme was the prevalence of English. Unlike Sao Paulo, the conversation was in English.  We discussed the fact that a significant number of Brazilians apparently prefer to contribute to English Wikipedia to reach a global audience, even though there is plenty of room for growth of the Portuguese Wikipedia. Some also expressed that Portuguese Wikipedia is considered second class vs. English. We all agreed that having a first class Portuguese Wikipedia is vital to meeting our vision and we took away the question of how to encourage bilingual Brazilians to contribute in Portuguese.

Creating an offline Wikipedia
We had some promising conversations about the potential to distribute offline versions of Wikipedia to people who have computers, but do not have regular access to the Internet. This is a large proportion of Brazilians. We are committed to supporting partnerships to do this, but we need to create a selection of the Portuguese Wikipedia to make available offline. We would love it if community members who were interested in contributing to this initiative would connect with Jessie.

General remarks
These specific meet-ups in addition to other interactions with community in Brazil (in Recife, Campinas, and Porto Alegre) on this trip collectively communicated the great need and potential for mobilization behind the Portuguese Wikipedia within Brazil. While there are great obstacles – negative quality perceptions, low numbers of editors, limited admin support in addition to the fact that some editors prefer to edit the English Wikipedia – opportunities to mobilize existing community and engage a broader Brazilian population seem abundant, and there is no better time than now. We’re excited to continue supporting such a dynamic movement within Brazil and will continue to support and encourage outreach activities designed to further catalyze the collection and dissemination of knowledge within Brazil. We continue to seek more opportunities to hear from Brazilian community members and to learn more about opportunities. We’d also like to thank everyone who helped with the visit and who met with us. Muito Obrigado!

- Barry Newstead, Carolina Rossini, Jessie Wild