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Brazil report

Wiki Loves Maranhão

By Sandra Soster


Maranhão is the eighth largest state of Brazil. It is part of the Northeast Region and it contains 217 municipalities. Its capital is the island of São Luís, the only Brazilian state capital founded by France. The state has some great assets listed as UNESCO World Heritage: Historical Center of São Luís (1997), Lençóis Maranhenses National Park (2024), and Bumba meu boi (2019).

The northern portion of the state is a heavily forested plain traversed by numerous rivers, occupied by the eastern extension of the tropical moist forests of Amazonia. The north-central and northeastern portion is home to a tropical moist forest ecoregion dominated by the Babaçu palm. The southern portion is occupied by the Cerrado savannas. The state is also occupied by several plateau escarpments, including the Chapada das Mangabeiras, Serra do Tiracambu, and Serra das Alpercatas.

The cuisine of Maranhão has been influenced by French, Portuguese, African, and Indigenous traditions. Its seasoning is distinct, featuring ingredients such as cheiro-verde (a mix of cilantro and green onions), ground cumin, and black pepper. In Maranhão, fish and seafood play a significant role, including shrimp, sururu (a type of mollusk), crab, siri (a smaller crab species), hake, curimbatá, sorubim, and various freshwater and saltwater fish.

The Bumba Meu Boi of Maranhão is a cultural festivity deeply rooted in the city of São Luís, the capital, as well as in the countryside. A tradition that has persisted since the 18th century, it gathers locals and visitors across the state during the months of June and July. It is a popular celebration enjoyed by children, adults, and the elderly, with groups performing in neighborhoods, city squares, and even shopping malls. Whether in the old or new parts of the city, groups from all over the state come together in various festival sites (arraiais) to celebrate until dawn.

Knowledge gap

Despite the great cultural diversity, more than half of the cities in the state have five or fewer photographs on Wikimedia Commons, and 49 of them do not have a single image. The information gap on Wikidata includes 1,129 people without any data on their ethnicity and a significant disparity between the number of men registered on the platform (1,038) and women (263), with only one transgender woman recorded.

On Wikipedia, most articles about the municipalities contain around 10,000 characters (90 of them) and have 10 or fewer references (122 of them). There are no good or featured articles related to Maranhão.

Wiki Loves Maranhão is an initiative organized by Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB), with support from the Wikimedia Foundation. It aims to highlight Maranhão's cultural, historical, and natural heritage on Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia in Portuguese. In 2025, Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) will mobilize volunteer editors, institutional partners and Maranhão communities to improve coverage of this state on the internet! And GLAM institutions are important partners for filling in the image and content gaps.


Main GLAM activities in 2025

Lusophone GLAM Campaign

ALONG THE YEAR

The Lusophone GLAM Campaign aims to enhance collaboration between cultural institutions and Wikimedia in Portuguese-speaking countries, with a particular focus on African countries. By fostering partnerships and driving digitization efforts, the campaign seeks to improve access to and preservation of Lusophone cultural heritage on open, collaborative platforms such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. A longer term vision for this initiative is to develop and implement it as a network of partners, creating a self-sustaining collective of GLAM institutions that can thrive with our guidance and for which we can act as a helpdesk for inquiries and technical requests. There are intrinsical risks in any project to foster Wikimedia engagement where little engagement has previously occurred, and we see value in both achieving our goals and in documenting this process for further rounds of partnership building across the Portuguese-speaking world.


Wiki Loves Folklore Brasil

FEBRUARY / MARCH

Wiki Loves Folklore (WLF) (Wiki Loves Popular Culture, in Portuguese) is an annual competition organized by members of the Wikimedia community around the world. Participants take photographs, record videos and audios of various manifestations of Brazilian popular culture from their region or places they have visited, then upload them to Wikimedia Commons. The contest aims to give visibility to the intangible heritage of the participating countries, encouraging people to record them in some media and to publish these images, videos and audios under a free license, so that they can be used not only on Wikipedia, but anywhere and by anyone.

At left, the winner of WLF Brasil 2024: Cavalhadas de Pirenópolis, GO, by Michelly Matoss.


Every Book Its Reader

APRIL

Every Book Its Reader (#EveryBookItsReader) is a campaign to increase quality content about books, literary works, and their authors specially in Wikipedia. The campaign name is the third law in Ranganathan’s five laws of library science. The overall campaign has been planned and organized by nine volunteer Wikimedians, who are passionate about books and stories. In Brazil, the campaign is organized by Lilian Viana (Library of ECA/USP) and Stela Madruga (Library of IME/USP).


WikiCon Brasil 2025

JULY

The first ever conference for the Brazilian community occured in 2022, in São Paulo city, and gathered wikimedians from all across the country for a program designed to strategically strengthen Wikimedia outreach in Brazil. Wikimedia against misinformation was the main topic of this event because in recent years Brazil and the world have been suffering from misinformation: misleading, fabricated, exaggerated, manipulated or false content circulates on the internet, aimed at obtaining financial or political gains. Threat to open knowledge, the circulation of false information threatens the strengthening of reliable communication in the political and social spheres.

In 2025, the second edition will happen in the city of Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia and one of the oldest and first planned city of Brazil. Some of our GLAM-Wiki partners will also attend to the event and present joint activities.


Wiki Loves Monuments Brasil

SEPTEMBER

Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) is an annual photo competition organized by members of the Wikimedia community around the world. Wiki Movimento Brasil organize the national phase of Wiki Loves Monuments contest since 2019.

During this period, we invite anyone who has photographs of their own, current or from other years, which depict monuments and historic buildings, to upload these images to Wikimedia Commons. With this simple act, each photographer contributes to increasing the visibility of the built heritage of Brazil's cities, reinforcing their historical and cultural importance and, most importantly, preserving local memory and recording the passage of time.

At right, the winner of WLM Brasil 2024: Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, MG, by Rkieferbaum.

You may want to check the map with the listed / historical assets we've gathered along the years:

> > > LINK HERE < < <


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