For the 32nd round of Outreachy, Wikimedia Brasil’s participation is targeting another wishlist from our Lusophone Technological Wishlist! Published on May 30th, 2025, the list encompasses diverse wishes from the lusophone community for our Wikimedia Movement and sociotechnical infrastructure. In our previous participation, we solved wish #2 with the deployment of ArquiBot. For this round, we are tackling wish #3: automatic verification of duplicate references in the Visual Editor.
The idea is that when a user inputs a reference that already exists in the “Auto” tab of the Visual Editor, it can check and suggest a reference reuse instead of adding a duplicate. This mapping will be made through identifiers like URL, DOI or ISBN. A pop-up appears and the user can reuse an existing reference or add the current one normally. Our development plan is already available on Wikimedia Commons.
Although this need emerged from the lusophone community, it’s an improvement that can benefit the whole Wikimedia community, as this issue of duplicate references and reference reuse happens on other wikipedias as well. With that, we not only satisfy our community needs but also improve local capacity of interacting with international tools and foster solidarity between different language communities.
For this round of Outreachy, we are having our first intern from Latin America: Ana Maria Ruiz from Bolivia! Usually the participation of Latin American interns in the Outreachy selection process is very very low. We hope that this round can be a reference for future Latin American interns that wish to apply for Outreachy and that Ana Maria Ruiz can be an example for the latam tech community! Speaking about community, Ana is already joining our latam tech spaces, specifically our Telegram group that discusses technical subjects. The Wikimedia Brasil mentors for this round are Artur Corrêa and Éder Porto.
Here is Ana Maria Ruiz, I am a developer based in Tarija, Bolivia who enjoys building blocks. It has been three weeks since I started my internship at Wikimedia and I am more than happy to be here. My mentors are part of Wikimedia Brasil and together we are addressing the Lusophone Technological Wishlist. During these first weeks I have been learning a lot about the Wikimedia ecosystem, not only about my project but about many other projects that I was not aware of.
I meet twice a week with my mentors to discuss more on the project progress and solve any doubt or issue I may have on the sprint. That is how I learnt about the complexity of the citation feature and the many services that are used to create a reference. It was challenging and interesting since there’s a lot of documentation involved but this is what makes it entertaining, you can dig as much as you can to find your answer and if I feel overwhelmed I can email my mentors to get unstuck and keep going.
But this internship is not just programming and repositories, the Wikimedia Foundation also set up a couple of sessions to know more about the mission with free knowledge, other projects in the ecosystem, opportunities to contribute to the community and grants. Did you know that humans are not the largest volume of Wikipedia users? Actually, many artificial intelligence models repeatedly use Wikipedia content for training and that’s why the biggest traffic is from non-human sources. I am learning the big picture of Wikimedia impact in the world and enjoying this journey.
What comes next? Keep tackling wish #3 and try to have it resolved during this internship. You can keep yourself updated on the Lusophone Technological Wishlist in its talk page and on the wishlist #3 on its talk page.
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