The Wikipedia Education Program is taking off in Brazil! As we’re entering the final month of the semester, I had the opportunity to visit the different professors of the courses, and work with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Brazilian team to see how we can close the semester well and prepare well for the upcoming semester of classes. I obviously already knew we had a great team on the ground – Oona and Tom – but this time I had the opportunity to meet with even more of the enthusiastic volunteers who are involved.

Take Mariana Jo. She is a campus ambassador in São Paulo who decided, after hearing Kul Wadhwa speak at Campus Party, that she wanted to be more involved with the Wikimedia movement and spreading free knowledge. As the first member of her family to go to a public university (typically they are top universities in Brazil), she has a passion for creating broadly available resources and teaching her peers about the importance of sharing their information. She is starting off her involvement by helping with a Physics course at the University of São Paulo as a student in the department herself, where she trains other students how to contribute their course assignments to Wikipedia.

Or take Professor Pablo Ortellado, also at the University of São Paulo. His students are spending the whole semester working on encyclopedic articles about Brazilian cultural policy, which do not yet exist on the Portuguese Wikipedia. The semester-long class brings in experts in the field to discuss different aspects of cultural policy and provide information for references for the student groups. He is already known across Brazil for his passion for open access, and he is excited to expose his students to these concepts in conjunction with the course topics of cultural policy.

All the courses are just getting into the full swing of editing, so we are excited to watch the continuing contributions of additional knowledge to the Portuguese Wikipedia!

Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development

Every year, hundreds of Wikimedians descend upon a single city for an annual international conference: Wikimania. Its hackathon and presentation days are filled with workshops and discussions around Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) projects, the open source MediaWiki software, and free knowledge/content. The forum provides excellent opportunities for socialization and idea dissemination between Wikimedia groups from around the world.

It is imperative that a diverse, representative group is enabled to attend the conference, representing a variety of cultures, languages, and projects. To that end, the Wikimedia Foundation and some Wikimedia chapters offer a limited number of scholarships with the goal of making Wikimania a productive conference by enabling the attendance of a diverse group of participants in the Wikimedia movement.

As the movement continues to grow and expand around the world, it is unfortunately impossible to fund the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have contributed, but each year we strive to support a select few who we think will both greatly benefit from the conference and contribute to the conference. A “Scholarship Review Committee” — entirely consisting of community volunteers — reviews a large number of scholarship applicants (over a thousand this time), scoring applicants on their activity in the Wikimedia projects and other compatible movements as well as their potential for future contributions in the Wikimedia movement. WMF looks at the recommendations of the committee and accounts for the diversity of the pool of candidates in order to support a diverse group of representatives from countries around the world, allocating more scholarships to global south regions, editors in smaller language projects, and women.

This year, we are pleased to announce that scholarships have been awarded to 130 individuals from 57 countries! We were able to sponsor so many people with the help of Wikimédia France, who also contributed directly to the general funds for scholarships. These representatives contribute to a variety of projects and will bring both old and fresh experiences into the conference.  Scholarships this year were awarded by region in an effort to ensure that we would have good representation from different countries. Partial scholarships were distributed based on the applicants’ indication of whether or not they could pay, and funds were distributed via partial scholarships where possible in order for the most people to attend. So for example, though North Americans make up 13% of the total scholarship recipients, they represent only 5% of the total anticipated funding because about 65% of those spots were only partial scholarships.

As always, the field was incredibly competitive, with 1113 applicants from 118 countries. The overall acceptance rate of applicants for the WMF scholarships was 12%, with Europe as the lowest at 8%. Note that the low acceptance from Europe was intentional, as a series of Chapter-funded scholarships for Europeans are about to be announced which will boost the participation numbers from this region.

While we are excited about the input our 130 scholars will provide this year to the conference, we wish that all the other excellent contributors who applied would be able to attend. The scholarships are in no way a direct reflection on one’s value in the community -it is a result of a very competitive process, where many deserving community members are unable to be funded for this year. We greatly value the participation of all in the Wikimedia projects and sincerely hope that all applicants will continue to participate in both local and worldwide conversations online outside of this event!

Jessie Wild, Liaison with the Scholarship Review Committee

Source: “Fuse-Project”; upload to OLPC-Wiki: OLPC user “Walter” (CC-BY-SA-2.5)

In the quest to get the information resource Wikipedia into the hands of the entire world, we are excited to note that the offline Wikipedia reader Kiwix has recently been extended to read offline Wikipedia files on the Sugar operating system!

Sugar is an open source desktop environment specifically customized for children. It runs on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO computers, which are often distributed throughout areas of the world without access to the Internet. Now, the students who get one of these computers will have the ability to access information from the largest open educational resource in the world via a great interface!

Congratulations to developers reg and Kelson and to Wikimedia Switzerland for the execution and funding of this project. We hope to hear many inspiring stories about deployments and use cases! To help beta test, see the downloading options at sugarlabs (be sure to download Sugar first). See the Offline Projects page for a broad overview of Offline Wikipedia and information on how to get involved.

Jessie Wild
Special Projects Manager, Global Development

About Kiwix:

Kiwix is a full featured offline reader for Web content, specifically designed for the Offline Wikipedia projects. It stores the content in the ZIM file format, a highly compressed open format with additional metadata. The project is supported by a host of volunteers led by developers reg and Kelson. Kiwix is free software and offers localized options. For more information, see www.kiwix.org.

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