The monthly events of the group, sustained activities, and tight community of practitioners of Wiki Movimento Brasil led to a large-scale project focused on content related to the Ipiranga Museum, commonly known as the Museu Paulista. The Museu Paulista opened in the late nineteenth century in a monumental building by the Italian architect Tommaso Gaudenzio Bezzi. The structure commemorated the independence of Brazil and its early collections emphasized the natural history of the country. The long directorship of the historian Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay reoriented its collections to emphasize the independence movements and establishment of the federal republic of Brazil, the history of the state of São Paulo, and historical and cultural objects of the early twentieth century. The museum was integrated into the University of São Paulo in 1963. Bezzi’s museum structure is now a federally protected monument in its own right. Activities of the museum include the maintenance and exhibition of its physical collection and support of research related to its activities. The museum closed in 2013 due to financial problems and is expected to reopen in 2022.
Wiki Movimento Brasil and Museu Paulista partnered on April 4, 2020, to organize Wikidata Lab XXI: Structuring Bibliographic References. The first part of the workshop was a webinar on how to automate the creation of Wikidata items of scholarly articles. The second part of the workshop was a collective effort among attendees to index articles from the primary journal of the museum, Anais do Museu Paulista (English: “Annals of the Paulista Museum”), into Wikidata. Twenty-six editors participated in the project, and their work resulted in creating 876 items: 511 for journal articles and 365 for authors. Ultimately, approximately 31,000 statements were added to Wikidata.
The Anais is a scholarly journal published by the Museu Paulista since 1922. It serves not only to disseminate scholarship on the museum itself, but it is also one of the primary history and museology journals in Brazil. The Anais dates to the early period of Taunay’s directorship of the museum and reflects his focus on the formation of the Brazilian nation. Taunay’s influence is mirrored in the journal’s early subtitle, “Organ of the History of Brazil Section, and Especially of São Paulo, of the Paulista Museum” (Bittencourt, 2012). It draws heavily
