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Brazil report

Every Book Its Reader is coming

By Sandra Soster & Juliana Cunha

As we told in our April 2023 and April 2024 reports, Every Book Its Reader (#EveryBookItsReader) is a global campaign to increase quality content about books and writers in Wikimedia platforms, specially Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. The campaign name is the third of the Ranganathan’s five laws of library science. In Brazil, the campaign is organized by Lilian Viana (Library of FMS/USP) and Stela Madruga (Library of IME/USP), with Wikimedia Brasil's support.

In celebration of the month of books, for this 2025's edition, we gathered this campaign and the first day of community meetings throughout Brazil. On April 5th, we will bring together people in some municipalities across the country. Libraries, cultural centers, museums and cafés will welcome experienced Wikipedians and newcomers to celebrate writers and their works.

See the results from recent years:

Year Active editors Articles created Articles edited Bytes added
2023 14 26 1,043 349,875
2024 200 252 21,9K 19,2M


Workshop "Unraveling Wikibase, Empowering Library Collection Management"

On March 27, Wikimedia Brasil, Wikimedia Portugal, and the NOVA SBE Library to showcase the potential of Wikibase in transforming how libraries can manage and share their data online. The online workshop highlighted the power of Wikibase in library collection management and also data visualization. The workshop was aimed at librarians, archivists, information professionals, and others interested in open data and semantic technologies.

Éder Porto (Wikimedia Brazil) presented the Theoretical Foundations of Wikidata and Wikibase, while Daniel Gonçalves (NOVA SBE) shared the Practical Case of the NOVA SBE Library, which already uses Wikibase to manage its collections.

See the slides presented during the workshop (only in Portuguese), WMB's Wikimedia and Libraries Campaign, and WMB's Lusophone GLAM Campaign.


New partnership with Museu da Imagem e do Som do Rio de Janeiro

We have signed one new GLAM partnership in the city of Rio de Janeiro: the "Museu da Imagem e do Som do Rio de Janeiro" (Museum of Image and Sound of Rio de Janeiro, MIS-RJ) has become a GLAM partner of Wikimedia Brasil.

MIS-RJ was inaugurated on September 3, 1965, as part of the celebrations for the IV Centenary of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The institution pioneered a new genre of audiovisual museum, which soon inspired similar institutions across other Brazilian cities. In addition to establishing itself as a center for music and image documentation, MIS-RJ became an avant-garde cultural hub during the 1960s and 1970s, serving as a meeting point for new ideas, behaviors, and movements.

Through this partnership, the museum will share part of its collection under free licenses. Together, we will promote edit-a-thons, photowalks, and other activities aimed at expanding knowledge about this collection on Wikimedia platforms.

See the Museu da Imagem e do Som do Rio de Janeiro's GLAM page.


New partnership with Federação Brasileira de Associações de Bibliotecários, Cientistas de Informação e Instituições

In March, we also signed one new GLAM partnership with Federação Brasileira de Associações de Bibliotecários, Cientistas de Informação e Instituições (Brazilian Federation of Associations of Librarians, Information Scientists and Institutions, FEBAB), a national institution founded in 1959, whose mission is to defend and promote the development of professions related to libraries in Brazil. This partnership will enable the upload of batches of reliable metadata about Brazilian libraries of various types, as well as expand the dissemination of wiki-related activities among FEBAB’s member associations.

This partnership represents a highlight of the efforts initiated by Wikimedia Brazil at the beginning of 2023 with the creation of the WMB Library Strategic Committee, to expand and improve its performance in terms of GLAM partnerships with librarians in Brazilian territory, as we presented in our April 2023 report.

See the Federação Brasileira de Associações de Bibliotecários, Cientistas de Informação e Instituições's GLAM page and WMB's Wikimedia and Libraries Campaign.


Location of plants of Maranhão
Caryocar brasiliense (known as Pequi), one of the species of plants with taxon range uploaded.

As we told in our report of January, 2025 is the year of the State of Maranhão on Wikimedia platforms. Part of the GLAM activities related to this campaign is improve information on State fauna, flora, cultural institutions, events and heritage on Wikidata. In March we've uploaded metadata on 12,294 locations of 4,589 species of plants to Wikidata. The Wikidata Q identifiers already existed, but the majority of them did not have values for taxon range (P9714).

Most of the species in this batch were located in Carolina (796), São Luís (601), Loreto (521), Balsas (488), Caxias (338), Estreito (337), Mirador (310), Barra do Corda (309), Grajaú (279), Santa Luzia (208). The batch was composed of 2,437 Fabaceae, 766 Poaceae, 438 Bignoniaceae, 423 Cyperaceae, 392 Asteraceae, 364 Rubiaceae, 360 Euphorbiaceae, 321 Apocynaceae, 310 Annonaceae, 293 Myrtaceae.

See the Wiki Loves Maranhão campaign.


Archivos en vigília

In 2024, as presented in our report, Wikimedia Brasil joined the campaign Archivos en vigília: por la Verdad, los Derechos y el Acceso a la información organized by Wikimedia Argentina with the Archivo Histórico UNLP (La Plata University) to advocate for the opening of archives, specially related to Memory and Democracy, because on the March 24th (the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice) in allusion to the victims of military dictatorship. The campaign was composed of one online panel and one upload activity.

In 2025, we keep this important partnership. For this campaign, our GLAM partner National Archives shared a fund of documents related to the period of Brazilian dictatorship: BR DFANBSB IE - Centro de Informações do Exterior. Wikimedia Brasil uploaded 232 archives from 1966 to 1985.

Among them we would like to talk about international relationship between Brasil and Argentina:

Above you may see one piece of news uploaded for this campaign where you may read:

“ In January 1969, the ORGANIZATION OF FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLES OF LATIN AMERICA (OAPAL), based in Montreal, Canada, sent a message of congratulations to the government of Fidel Castro on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.

The organization expressed “its confidence that the Cuban Revolution will once again show the path that the exploited and oppressed peoples of the Latin American continent must follow to put an end to the oppression of North American imperialism and its native puppet exploiters.”

”

The Centro de Informações do Exterior (CIEX or Ciex), whose archive has been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, was an intelligence service of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, linked to the National Information Service. It was created in 1966 during the Castelo Branco administration. CIEX was so secretive that it did not appear in the official structure of the Government. Its existence was only confirmed in 2007, during President Lula’s second term. Until 1975, CIEX operated under the guise of the Foreign Policy Documentation Advisory Office (ADOC), in Room 410 on the fourth floor of Annex I of the Itamaraty Palace. It was dismantled with the end of the dictatorship in 1985.

Each uploaded file is a PDF document containing various pieces of news classified as "confidential" by the Brazilian government during the country’s military dictatorship. The files include OCR, making it possible to search their contents.

See Centro de Informações do Exterior Fund and all the media uploded from National Archives.


Africa Hour

In the end of February, Wiki in Africa gathered speakers from Switzerland, Brazil (Wikimedia Brasil's GLAM and Culture Manager), Cameroon, and Nigeria to talk about decolonizing knowledge on Wikipedia. Participants emphasized the role of collaborative projects in giving visibility to lesser-known stories, including oral traditions and regional cultural practices. Digitization efforts, local content creation, and the documentation of traditional knowledge were identified as key strategies to preserve and share perspectives still underrepresented online. One of the main takeaways was the importance of strengthening connections between GLAM institutions and Wiki projects to expand access to the vast cultural heritage that remains largely offline. The conversation highlighted how platforms like Wikipedia can help local communities tell their own stories, promoting a more accurate representation of traditions, memories, and knowledge that have historically been marginalized by Eurocentric narratives.

See the video on Wiki in Africa's Youtube channel and WMB's Lusophone GLAM Campaign.


Former GLAM-Wiki Manager

BTW: April 2025 marks my final month as Wikimedia Brasil’s GLAM and Culture Manager.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to every member of the WMB team and to all our institutional partners for the invaluable exchanges and collaborative efforts over these past years in a role that, as some have kindly said, seemed tailor-made for me.

Over the course of three years, we established 40 new partnerships across 10 Brazilian states, facilitated the upload of hundreds of thousands of items, and created countless meaningful and memorable moments.

I remain convinced that GLAM and Wiki are a perfect match. I leave this position with enduring admiration for the GLAM-Wiki ecosystem and sincere affection for each and every one of WMB’s GLAM partners.

Although stepping down from this role, I will continue contributing as a volunteer—serving as a Portuguese Wikipedia administrator, a heavy user of Wikimedia Commons, and a dedicated contributor to both Wikidata and Wikisource.

Let us remain steadfast in our mission to preserve and disseminate every fragment, voice, and nuance of our country’s stories, cultures, and collective memory.

See you around the Wiki universe.


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