One of the original materials created by the Brazil’s Catalyst Program was the "Wikimedia na Sala de Aula" (Wikimedia on Classroom). Though the material was an initiative of Célio Costa Filho on the context of the Catalyst Program, it also had the voluntary collaboration of the professor and User Group’s member Jorge Makssoudian, responsible for providing more accessible readings on lesson plans to initiating professors.
Workshop on editing Wikipedia entries at Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, October 2014A Wikimedia Education Program on management and organizational science, with Prof. Lina Nakata. Details available here. The User Group was present with Vitor Mazuco.
Workshop on editing Wikipedia entries at Faculdade Cásper Líbero, March 2014A Wikimedia Education Program on the Brazilian military dictatorship was produced with undergraduate students within a course on Political Science at the School of Journalism. Details available here. The User Group was present with Joalpe, Joalpe and Sturm.[1][2][3][4][5]
A Wikimedia Commons projet on urban life in São Paulo city with undergraduate students of Marketing. Pictures that were uploaded are available here, total of 84 files.
As part of the Education Program in Brazil, there was a series of activities in Porto Alegre, in the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in the Book Fair and in a bookstore (Livraria Cultura). In November 14th, the guest Patrício Lorente (WMF Board) presented the panel “Wikipedia and the University”, followed by a roundtable with professors of the university. On November 16th, Patricio Lorente and the volunteer of the User Group, professor and experient editor Fabio Azevedo talked about “Wikipedia: for 300 years a challenge” on the 60th Book Fair of Porto Alegre. Following, Fábio Azevedo presented “How Wikipedia works” at Livraria Cultura, a bookstore. In consequence of the event, the User Group was invited to take part in the Academic Week of IFRS - an educational institute in Caxias do Sul.
The edit-a-thon was promoted at National Conference of Experiences in Primary Health Care and Family Health, a national conference on Family Health an Community organized by the Ministry of Health of Brazil. From an invitation to the extinct Catalyst Program, two volunteers from the User Group, Vinicius Siqueira and Lucas Teles, participated of the organization and execution of the edit-a-thon. On the first day, we performed an introductory discussion about Wikipedia, guided by its Five Pillars. The discussion included the participation of several experts of different knowledge fields, such as Health, Education and Communication and about 20 spectators. On the second day, the editing of articles related with the conference was performed. The participation on the event and the execution of the edit-a-thon opened a possible door for a partnership on the future with departments of the Ministry of Health, which has shown interest on adding Wikimedia projects on its programs. Dialogue is ongoing.
The presence of User Group’s volunteers in Brasília also motivated the arrangement of a meetup with Wikipedia editors from the city, the 2nd WikiBrasília.
Edit-a-thon promoted in April 2014, arranged by the journalist Luciana Galastri and Think Olga community. About 30 people interested in learning how to edit Wikipedia for an editing marathon with two objectives: promoting this tool between women and creating and improving articles about female scientists. The event had a strong online support from Celio Costa Filho, that acted via Catalyst Program, and by actual presence of two User Group’s volunteers, Rafael Moretti and Victor Lopes, helping participants that had never edited Wikipedia so far.[6]
On 18th January 2014, the first Mapping Party was set in the city of Salvador. Users from OpenStreetMaps and Wikimedia joined for a walk in the center of the city in order to map spots of the area and upload files on Commons, connecting these two free platforms. Besides the upload of photos, informations from Wikipedia articles were added to OpenStreetMaps, geographic coordinates linked in Wikipedia articles. The participation of Wikimedia members celebrated the “WikiDay”, a day for colaborating with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis.
After Wikimania 2014, the User Group organized a community members meeting, on the city of Sao Paulo to discuss the future of Wikimedia in Brazil. The meeting had the participation of dozens of volunteers, and also Asaf Bartov (WMF) and Patricio Lorente (WMF Board). The User Group was responsible for organizing of all the event structure, including servings, local and accommodation reservations to participants from other cities. An introduction to the User Group was presented to other community members. During the meeting, the challenges to the Wikimedia movement in Brazil were discussed together with possible strategies to its consolidation. It was referred by the participants as one of the most important and productive events ever executed in the country.
The summit of Iberocoop, a cooperation group of the Wikimedia movement in Iberoamerica, happened in Buenos Aires and counted with the attendance of several chapters and user groups of the region. The User Group was represented by the volunteers Célio Costa Filho and Vinicius Siqueira. The summit was particularly interesting for the User Group because it helped to build the group’s capacity regarding to strategic planning and projects formulation, above sharing experiences and best practices with other groups present.
From a reported difficulty of people on finding information on how to participate of the Wikimedia Movement on br.wikimedia site, User Group’s volunteers elaborated and promoted the restructuring of page, creating sections that could easily aggregate ways of how to help the movement, pages that would allow an easier access to support materials and an area dedicated to the Education Program, which was taken to Wikipedia community afterwards, what we understand as way of recognizing the high value of the created material. Members of groups directly involved on site reformulation were Célio Costa Filho and Diana Cury.
Beginning in 2015, the WUG Brasil will have a permanent space at ARede, a portal of technology and education that will publish monthly original articles written by WUG Brasil about using Wikimedia projects in educational settings class.
Around April, 2014, Jonas had some meetings with the press staff of the governor of Pernambuco. The discussion was about releasing all the content from the oficial Flicker account as CC by sa. They accepted to change the license.
The account has 16,908 photos, covering the governor activities and state events from 2009 to 2014.
