South and underrepresented communities to engage in the large-scale contribution of items for scholarly articles and related academic literature to Wikidata. For these editors, tools and processes that are commonly used in resource-richer communities are often not helpful, as they depend on data that are already well-structured and easy to automatically feed to Wikidata. Commercial journal platforms and common metadata structures are well established in the Global North; in contrast, the situation in Brazil and elsewhere is ad-hoc. e process we present in this chapter is more easily replicable in Global South contexts.
Context
The edit-a-thon emerged among Wikimedia knowledge communities to increase content and depth of a subject area of common importance to its members or provide instruction on Wikimedia tools or practices. As the portmanteau of “edit” and “marathon” suggests, they are “in-person or virtual events where Wikimedia community members write or enhance Wikipedia articles, upload or edit metadata for images in Wikimedia Commons, add or enhance structured data in Wikidata, or other Wikimedia-related knowledge project activities” (ARL Task Force on Wikimedia and Linked Open Data, 2019). Edit-a-thons at Stanford University, Indiana University-Purdue, University of Indianapolis, and Laurentian University are described in the literature (Allison-Cassin & Scott, 2018; Keller et al., 2011; Lemus-Rojas & Pintscher, 2018). Descriptions of edit-a-thons outside the Global North in scholarly literature, however, are lacking.
The activities of Grupo de Usuários Wiki Movimento Brasil (English: Wiki Movement Brazil User Group), a national-level Wikimedia umbrella organization in Brazil, range from group editing projects to instruction on advanced tools. The user group has organized two distinct activity modalities: edit-a-thons, known as maratonas de edição or editatonas in Brazilian Portuguese, and Wikidata Labs. In contrast to the edit-a-thon, the Wikidata Lab emerged in 2017 as periodic events to share resources and capacities for the integration of Wikidata into other Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia. is series of events was awarded the 2019 WikidataCon Award, in the Category Outreach. Wikidata Labs evolved into connecting Wikimedians to GLAMs and set up a space for working directly on their collections.
