Wikipedia: Brazil

Wikipedia is a widely used platform that diffuses a wealth of knowledge to countries that utilize the online encyclopedia service. In the country of Brazil, according to Wikimedia Statistics, there are approximately 200-350M page views per month. Just recently in January 2022, there were around 260M page viewers in Brazil (Wikistats). To analyze the spread of the usage of Wikipedia across Brazil, I looked at the population of Brazil and the number of articles written in Portuguese in combination with the number of “page views” Wikipedia receives in Brazil per month.

Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, and according to the World Bank, there are 212.6 million (2020) people in the country of Brazil. With an average of 300M Wikipedia page views per month, Brazil receives an average of 1.41 page viewership per person. Compare that to the United States with an average of 12.14 page views per person (329.5 million (2020) population (World Bank) in the US, 3B views monthly (Wikistats)). According to this data, the United States’ population only has roughly 1.55 times more people than Brazil, but Wikipedia in the United States receives roughly 8.61 times more viewership than Brazil on average monthly. Although Wikipedia is used by much of the population, the online encyclopedia is not completely relied upon as an information source. This can also be seen by the number of active editors in Brazil, averaging around 830 total monthly (Wikistats). Delving further, the number of newly registered users in Brazil has totaled to the amount of 250K, according to Wikistats. Although Wikipedia retains viewership from the Brazilian population, Rede Globo is the leading news information source in Brazil (Ceron).

The information uncovered about Brazil on its Wikipedia website includes detailed analyses of its Etymology, History, Geography, Government and Politics, Economy, Infrastructure, Demographics, and Culture (Wikipedia).

Contents

• 1. Etymology
• 2. History
• 3. Geography
• 4. Government and politics
• 5. Economy
• 6. Infrastructure
• 7. Demographics
• 8. Culture

According to XTools, a built-in interface that Wikipedia uses to measure its usage, there are 17,417 total edits contributed to the “Brazil” Wikipedia page, 5,514 editors, 1,510 page watchers, and 561,081 Pagewatchers from the past two months (XTools).

Now, the top 5 users that contributed to editing the “Brazil” Wikipedia page were as follows:

Each of these editors has contributed thousands of characters to the Brazil Wikipedia article, and the last edit was on February 11th, 2022 by InternetArchiveBot, and the first edit was on September 30th, 2001 by Joao. According to this tool, there are an average of 3 edits per day and 71.2 edits per month.

Works Cited

1. Ceron, Rodrigo. “Most-Visited News Websites in Brazil.” Comscore, Inc., https://www.comscore.com/fre/Perspectives/Infographics/Most-Visited-News-Websites-in-Brazil#:~:text=Rede%20Globo%20led%20as%20the,Terra%20News%20with%2010.7%20million.
2. “Brazil – Page History.” XTools, https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Brazil.
3. “Brazil.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Feb. 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil.
4. “Wikistats – Statistics for Wikimedia Projects.” Wikistats – Statistics For Wikimedia Projects, https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/page-views-by-country/normal|map|2019-07-04~2019-07-05|(access)~desktop*mobile-app*mobile-web|monthly.