More History Theory Project on Wiki/Impact

This page is a translated version of the page Projeto Mais Teoria da História na Wiki/Impacto and the translation is 100% complete.

Nossa história

Políticas do projeto

Apresentação

Programação 2026

Atividades

Publicações

Impacto

Comunidade

Our biggest impact is people

Wikimedia Commons Workshop for students of the Intercultural Indigenous Degree in the Southern Atlantic Forest – UFSC 2022.
Meeting of the More History Theory Project on Wiki at WikiCon Brasil 2022.
Editathon More Black Women in History Theory on Wiki – UFRGS 2023.
Editathon More Indigenous Peoples in History Theory on Wiki – UnB 2023.
Editathon More Diversity in History Theory on Wiki – UERJ 2023.
Editathon "EPETH occupies Wikipedia" – UFRGS, during the IV Research Meeting on Theory of History and History of Historiography, 2023.
In-person workshop in the discipline Directed Reading XXVII (Museums and History Teaching) – UFOP 2023.
Editathon More Women in History Theory on Wiki – UFMG 2024.
Editathon More Diversity in History Theory on Wiki – Seridó Higher Education Center – UFRN (Caicó campus) 2024.
Wikipedia entry editing workshop during the Digital Humanities event – UDESC 2024.

Transformation into numbers

Expansion and improvement of content

The Mais+ History Theory Project's activities bring together an engaged community of volunteers who work together to increase diversity and representation on Wikimedia projects. Focused on bridging gaps in gender, sexuality, race, and epistemologies of the Global South, this collaborative network has fostered significant transformations in access to knowledge. Over the three years of the Mais+ Project, collective efforts have resulted in the following advances in content production:

The numbers presented above express the commitment of those involved in the Mais+ Project to the principles of encyclopedism, open knowledge, and a more equitable representation of the knowledge, histories, and groups that make up society. How can we measure these numbers to understand their significance?

Bridging gaps

We are part of a larger movement for gender equity and diversity in the construction of knowledge. According to Humaniki data, the percentage of entries about women in the Portuguese Wikipedia rose from 18.49% in December 2020 to 20.63% in March 2025—a concrete step forward in reducing gender gaps. In addition to the proportion of entries in relation to the total number of entries, an analysis of the year-over-year growth rate of entries marked by gender reveals a consistent upward trend. Between 2021 and 2025, the number of entries about women grew at rates that, proportionally, exceed those of men in every observed year. The same is true for the "other genders" category, whose percentage growth, although on a still very small base, is the fastest.

According to Humaniki data, entries about women and "other genders" are currently growing proportionally faster than entries about men. In total, between 2021 and 2025, 13,575 new articles about women and "other genders" were created on the Portuguese Wikipedia. While it's not easy to accurately measure our individual impact on this growth, it's clear that the actions, projects, and contributions of the community surrounding the Mais+ Project contribute to this process. Continuing to explore and address these inequalities is an essential part of our commitment to fairer and more diverse representation in the digital environment.

Community Growth and Engagement

Over the past three years, the Mais+ Project has been a meeting point for new connections, knowledge exchanges, and engagement. Its activities have mobilized a significant number of people, who have become involved with Wikimedia projects or deepened their sense of belonging as active participants in this global community. This dynamic of community strengthening, driven by the actions organized or supported by the Mais+ Project, is reflected in the following metrics:

Total number of people organizing activities: 35 organizers
Total number of activity facilitators: 45 facilitators
Total number of editors: 703 editors
New editors brought in by Project + activities: 316 new people
Number of editors retained: 50 editors retained

Audience Reach

Considering the number of people mobilized described above, what regional and national areas are involved in the Mais+ Project's activities? Which audiences are reached? Within the Portuguese-speaking Wikimedia community, which countries have exchanges and connections been established with? The map below represents the distribution of registrations for Mais+ Project's themed events in the countries where the registered participants reside. It is a good measure for evaluating the linguistic, cultural, and regional communities in dialogue with the Mais+ Project.

The map highlights Brazil as the center of Project Mais+'s activities, reaffirming its focus and rootedness in Brazilian realities. The significant uptake of proposals offered in different regions of the country highlights the initiative's local impact. Even so, registration points outside Brazil reveal a growing interest in other contexts, signaling the power of proposals like this to inspire action in different territories. This receptiveness demonstrates that similar initiatives can flourish in other locations, provided they are supported by groups willing to build networks sensitive to their realities. To achieve these results over three years, Project Mais+ relied on the support of more than 35 partners—both from the Wikimedia Movement and the Brazilian academic community—who were fundamental to its trajectory and reach.

Institutional and community partnerships and support have been crucial to the impact of Mais+ Project initiatives. They strengthen ties between the university and the Wikimedia ecosystem, expanding the reach of initiatives and fostering engagement with diverse audiences. These ties also create spaces for exchange between academic communities and Wikimedians, fostering the collective construction of knowledge and mutual recognition.

And how does this community-building manifest itself nationally, the center of the Mais+ Project's activities? The map below highlights a consolidated national presence, marked by the holding of themed events in different regions of Brazil over the course of three years. The distribution of points demonstrates that the project connects with multiple territories and touches on distinct local realities. This deep-rootedness contributes to diversifying the spaces for knowledge production, expanding the proposal's resonance and activating academic and cultural circuits nationwide.

One of the Mais+ Project's core commitments is to reach people belonging to groups historically underrepresented in institutional spaces and in the processes of knowledge production and circulation, encouraging their protagonism in reducing the asymmetries that also permeate Wikimedia projects. With an active presence in different regions of Brazil—and not just the historically more privileged South and Southeast regions—the project seeks to expand access to free knowledge production tools in a decentralized manner.

Establishing an active online community

The Mais+ Project's social media channels were designed as spaces for interaction with people interested in causes similar to those of the project, aiming to cultivate a dynamic and informative environment that encourages active community engagement in the activities proposed in our initiatives, especially among people who are not yet involved in the Wikimedia universe or who know little about it.

In this sense, the use of Facebook and Instagram aims to promote the Mais+ Project's activities, but also to provide more direct and dynamic contact with its community, whether event participants, facilitators, teachers with outreach activities, or even simply those curious and interested in this universe. YouTube, in turn, is dedicated to broadcasting thematic webinars and publishing editing tutorials on the Wikimedia projects supported by the Mais+ Project (Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons). It also serves as a platform for publishing explanatory videos about our mini-courses and editing contests, serving as a platform for interaction, training, and reflection.

The webinars, in particular, were designed as bridges between the University and the Wikimedia ecosystem, aiming to promote reflection on topics relevant to the construction of more equitable knowledge, connecting academic debates with collaborative production in Wikimedia projects. By May 2025, 10 editions of thematic webinars had been held, bringing together 20 speakers—including academics and Wikimedians—to discuss issues related to gender, sexuality, race, epistemologies of the Global South, and their intersectionalities, both in academic research and in knowledge production. These conferences had accumulated, to date, more than 3,470 views on YouTube, figures that reflect the community's interest in hearing from researchers and editors on historically marginalized topics and how to contribute to reducing gaps and better representing these topics in academia and on Wikimedia.

2025 Webinars:

c:File:Webinário Mais Pretas 2025.webm Mais Pretas: more than 100 views
More Indigenous Peoples: coming soon!

From its first Instagram post in February 2022 to May 2024, the mais+ Project reached an audience of 3,580 people through its social media channels. Much more than a specific quantitative achievement for the project, we understand these numbers as a reflection of the creation of ties with the community and society, as well as the reach of a new audience, largely academic, who have sparked interest in the dynamics and the Wikimedia universe and, often, see this contact as an incentive to edit. In 2024, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube were the source of 24% of registrations for our initiatives, making them the second largest source of overall registrations for the year. Of these, 62.5% were from people who did not have accounts or had never edited on Wikipedia at the time of their registration.

Strengthening ties in Basic and Higher Education

One of the Mais+ Project's main areas of activity is to establish bridges between the Brazilian educational environment and the Wikimedia universe through "follow-ups," understood as technical and pedagogical assistance in implementing activities in courses, disciplines, editathons, etc. By offering structured support and encouraging pedagogical experimentation and public history activities with Wikimedia platforms, the project contributes to the production of quality content and the development of critical skills among students and teachers. The following infographic highlights the technical knowledge transfer and capacity-building dimension developed within the Mais+ Project, highlighting the ongoing support provided to new organizers—mostly university professors, but also elementary school teachers, undergraduate, and graduate students.

Over the two years of its implementation, a total of 19 monitoring sessions were conducted. The regions of Brazil most covered by the activities were concentrated in the South and Southeast, but also in the North and Northeast. This area of action not only strengthens the project's sustainability but also fosters new leadership and expands the diversity of voices in the open knowledge ecosystem—with effects that extend beyond the annual calendar of activities.

Inclusion of underrepresented groups

One of the Mais+ Project's efforts is to expand the audiences involved, embrace diverse experiences, and foster more diverse spaces for editing and debate. We are aware that contributing to a more equitable Wikipedia is an ongoing process—and that's exactly where we want to be: joining forces to transform. The events organized and planned annually address topics such as gender, race, and sexuality, and registration data reveals how these aspects directly impact the profile of the participating audience. The graph below, for example, shows that themed events focusing on race attracted a higher percentage of Black participants, while those centered on gender attracted particularly strong female participation.

While not all registered people actively participate in activities or become editors on Wikimedia projects, this data points to effective communication and the Mais+ Project's ability to spark the interest of audiences often marginalized on digital platforms. The simple act of registration already represents significant progress: more people are learning about the Wikimedia movement, understanding its potential, and engaging with its tools and objectives.

When observing the presence of women as editors in Wikicontests promoted by the Mais+ Project, a significant fact also emerges. The graph below represents the percentage of female editors in editing contests considering the events held between 2022 and the first half of 2024, a period marked, at the beginning and end, by the holding of two themed events on women.

Initiatives such as "More Women in History Theory on Wiki," with 56% participation by self-identified women in the 2022 edition and 45% in the 2024 edition, show that, even in spaces historically marked by gender underrepresentation, it is possible to create more inclusive and attractive contexts for new editors. Although some events have recorded lower percentages, the average participation of self-identified women remains above the general Wikipedian community. While only about 15% of people who edit the Portuguese Wikipedia identify as women, according to research by Pedro Costa (University of Minho) ^[1], events promoted by the Mais+ Project have managed to involve a significantly higher proportion of female participants (on average 35%). These data reinforce the importance of proactive actions that expand access, retention, and production of knowledge by women, contributing not only to balance among publishers but also to the diversity of published content itself.

The participation of people from underrepresented groups remains one of the biggest challenges facing the Wikimedia community. These barriers are structural and are reflected in both authorship and topic visibility, highlighting how gender and race still directly influence how notability is assessed on the platform, impacting who and what is considered worthy of an entry. The Mais+ Project maintains a careful and reflective approach to its strategies, continually seeking to improve its practices to meaningfully include more underrepresented voices in the construction of free knowledge.

Participation in interviews and podcasts

In 2024, in recognition of its social relevance, Projeto Mais+ was invited to participate in podcasts discussing topics such as open knowledge, collaborative knowledge construction, and digital literacy in academia. These spaces allowed for reflection on open knowledge production practices, their impact on universities and Wikimedia projects, and promoted the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in higher education.

The executive coordinators of the 2024 thematic events, Mariana Silveira and Evandro Santos, also gave interviews discussing the activities they coordinated and their respective themes. In these conversations, they addressed issues related to representation and the challenges of addressing gender and diversity gaps, as well as the importance of the academic community participating in the construction of free and high-quality knowledge on Wikipedia.

These participations expand the dialogue to broader audiences, especially among people linked to Historical Theory and Public History, encouraging researchers, faculty, and students—as well as the academic community in general—to recognize Wikimedia platforms as legitimate spaces for the construction and dissemination of knowledge.

ANPUH interviews:

More History Theory on Wiki: What's Next | Mariana Silveira and Evandro Santos

Café History:

Pirate History Podcast:

Digital Rights Voice Podcast:

Ep 07 – Digital Literacy for Academic Purposes, with Danielly Figueredo

References

↑ COSTA, Pedro. Profile of Portuguese-language Wikipedia editors. 2021. Available at: pt:File:Profile of Portuguese-language Wikipedia Editors.pdf

Patrocínio

[1] COSTA, Pedro. Profile of Portuguese-language Wikipedia editors. 2021. Available at: pt:File:Profile of Portuguese-language Wikipedia Editors.pdf

[1]