Wikipédia:Wikipedia Signpost

Status and community news

As of Tuesday, 9 October, 2006, the Portuguese language Wikipedia contains about 190.000 articles, making it the 8th largest Wikipedia in number of articles. Of these, 217 articles (approximately 1 in 837) are considered Os melhores artigos ("The best articles"). There is no equivalent to "good articles" on the Portuguese Wikipedia, but the creation of an equivalent category is under discussion, although no name for it has been decided. Also in discussion in the creation of a peer review.

The choice of a featured article is slightly different from the process in the English Wikipedia. First, the article must be submitted to the a voting that will include it in the list of "the best articles". Only after that it can be to a second voting, that chooses which articles could appear in the front page.

The latest three additions to the list of featured articles are:

• Guerra Fria (Cold War)
• Daltonismo (Color blindness)
• Florianópolis (Florianopolis)

As of 9 October, 2006, 61 users of the Portuguese language Wikipedia are administrators. Sysops make 0.05% of users out of a total number of 120,313 registered users and about 39% of the very active (100+ edits / month) contributors.

Since October 2005, when it had 82,000 articles, Portuguese language Wikipedia's article growth index has been 231%.

Recent changes

On the last few months, the Portuguese language community has made substantial transformations on Wikipedia dinamics, trying to adapt the project to the needs of its rapidly growing size. Traditional issues such as the adoption of Fair Use on Portuguese Wikipedia has left room for many others regarding a redevelopment of the project as a whole. As explained above, we redesigned the featured articles choice system, the Main page and many others features were created, such as "Imagem de destaque" (Featured image), "Sabia que" (Did you know), "Efeméride" (In the news), and so on...

Image policy

Currently the portuguese language Wikipedia is deciding whether it should disable the possibility of locally uploading media, centralizing all uploads to Wikimedia Commons, as it what was recently decided on Wikipedia in Spanish.

Community

WikiConcurso

In the first weeks of October the Portuguese Wikipedia held its fifth edition of "WikiConcurso" (WikiContest), whose main goal is to enhance the content of articles from a specific area; these articles must be stubs and contestants are invited to improve during a two-week period, at the end of which they are submitted to review and voting by fellow participants. The first four editions were very successful on achieving a good number of excellent articles, constituing one of the favorite activities of the Portuguese language community.

Wikiactividade

From quarrel in the Village Pump on some articles of Brazilian personalities that were incomplete in the lusophone wikipedia when compared with other wikis, appeared the idea of doing an activity for the creation or article translation, the Wikiactividade (Wikiactivity).

The first version, that happened from August 1 to August 31, required for the punctuation, articles created with a minimum of 2000 bytes, categorized and with interwikis. As result, it counted on the participation of 40 users and the creation of 1010 new articles.

Colaboração da semana

With the good results of Wikiatividade, the idea of a "Colaboração da semana" (Colaboration of the week) was given by some members of the community. Since we just began this effort, the initial focus is directed to articles with problems, like those needing links and categories.

Differences between versions of the Portuguese language

One of our most polemic discussions in the project are centered on the differences between the European Portuguese and the Brazilian Portuguese, what almost spawned other Wikipedias, something considered a heresy by the majority of Portuguese speaking community. Several discussions on our Village Pump and Meta pages threatened what most of Portuguese speaking sysops and veteran users consider 'an effort towards unity, respect and undertanding'. Many resolutions within this concept have been approved, like the use of neutral vocabulary in some cases and the development of an integration culture.

Userboxes

Instead of using the German userbox solution, the community decided, after a voting, to use a similar, but different sistem: userboxes should be included under the domain Wikipedia:Userbox/. Userboxes in users subpages, however, are allowed.

Wiki Meetings

The Portuguese language Wikipedia community (Brazilian users) held its second meeting on 5 August, 2006 in the city of São Paulo. The community from Portugal also held its metting (the first one) recently in Lisbon (7 October, 2006).

Sister Projects

The five portuguese language sister projects began from December 2003 to February 2005. Since then, they have grown considerably. All of them but one are on top 10.

• Wikibooks is 4th with 1 820 textbook pages.
• Wiktionary is 14th with 21.984 definitions.
• Wikiquote is 5th with 3.213 pages.
• Wikisource is 9th with 4.252 texts.
• Wikinews is 6th with 1625 news.