During WikiCon Brazil 2025, held on July 19–20 in Salvador, Bahia, the WikiProject Brazil Schools (WikiProjeto Brasil Escolas) contributed to key discussions at the largest Wikimedia community event and free knowledge ecosystem gathering in Brazil, centered on the theme “Strengthening Digital Public Goods.” The resonance between the WikiProject and the event’s theme lies in how open educational data can be transformed into freely accessible digital resources. It converges with global debates on new internet governance policies and the recognition of access to information as a human right.

The event’s theme aligns directly with the United Nations Global Digital Compact, which recognizes digital public goods (such as free software, open data, and open content) as essential pillars of an inclusive digital transformation. In this context, the WikiProject Brazil Schools exemplifies how Wikimedia projects can democratize access to educational information in the Global South. This process is built on providing a concrete materialization of these principles and demonstrating how local initiatives can contribute to global goals for the democratization of knowledge.

Apresentação do WikiProjeto Brasil Escolas na WikiCon Brasil 2025. Stanglavine. CC-BY-SA-4.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Educational Data Inequality

Wikidata currently records approximately 600,000 schools worldwide. However, fewer than 9,000 of them, only about 1.5%, are located in Brazil, a scenario that reflects a broader issue: the digital invisibility of educational institutions from the Global South in open knowledge repositories.

According to Brazil’s School Census, there are around 180,000 active schools in the country, meaning that only 4.8% of Brazilian institutions are represented on Wikidata. This disparity not only mirrors global information asymmetries but also undermines the ability of policymakers, researchers, and communities to access essential data for the development of effective educational policies.

A Response of the Wikimedia Movement

The WikiProject Brazil Schools emerged in 2024 as a strategic initiative to address this challenge. Based on open data from the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (Inep), the project employs tools such as QuickStatements and OpenRefine to systematically insert information about Brazilian schools into Wikidata.

The methodology is simple and replicable: Brazilian School Census data, made available in standardized formats, are processed, structured, and converted into Wikidata items. Beyond a technical action, this practice constitutes an act of data decolonization by structuring previously underrepresented information in an open and verifiable manner, making visible, within global knowledge repositories, data that have historically remained on the margins.

Georeferencing as a Tool for Equity

One of the most significant aspects of the WikiProject Brazil Schools is the georeferencing of school data. In April 2025, among the 8,602 Brazilian schools present on Wikidata, only 1,994 (23%) contained precise geographic coordinates. This lack of location data is not merely technical; it reflects representational disparities and territorial invisibility, particularly of schools in rural areas, urban peripheries, and territories of Indigenous and traditional communities.

The project not only seeks to correct these gaps but also builds bridges between different open-data ecosystems. Integration with OpenStreetMap significantly expands the potential use of these datasets, making them accessible even to users without advanced technical knowledge of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Impacts Beyond Digital Boundaries

The implications of the WikiProject Brazil Schools extend far beyond data organization. By making educational information more accessible and interoperable, the initiative:

• Strengthens transparency: Facilitates social oversight of public education policies.
• Reduces fragmentation: Centralizes data previously dispersed across isolated government systems.
• Enables comparisons: Supports transnational analyses among educational systems in the Global South.
• Fosters discovery: Enriches projects such as Wiki Loves Monuments by identifying schools that are also historical heritage sites.

A Replicable Model

One of the most significant aspects of the project is its potential as a model for other contexts. The strategies developed, the use of open-source tools, and their sustainability through collaboration among government, academia, and civil society can be adapted to other countries in the Global South facing similar challenges of unequal access to educational data.

Presentation of the WikiProject Brazil Schools at the Wiki Workshop 2025. Wikimedia Foundation. CC-BY. YouTube.

Education, traditionally seen as a public service, also reveals itself as a digital public good. When educational data are structured, georeferenced, and made available on open platforms, they become resources that can be reused, recombined, and recontextualized by different communities.

Future Perspectives

The presentation at WikiCon Brazil 2025 represents not only recognition of the project’s importance but also a turning point for its expansion. The discussions in Salvador highlighted how the WikiProject Brazil Schools resonates with global priorities to strengthen digital public goods, positioning it as a reference for similar initiatives in other contexts.

The project does not represent an end, but a strategic beginning. As more data are incorporated into Wikidata, new possibilities emerge from analyses of the territorial distribution of educational institutions to the development of tools that support local educational management in open and non-proprietary ways.

Most importantly, as made evident during WikiCon Brazil 2025, the project demonstrates that the democratization of knowledge is not only about creating data but also about making visible the structures and institutions that shape our societies. Each school added to Wikidata is simultaneously a statistical entry and an affirmation that education deserves to be known, recognized, and accessible as a true digital public good.

Acknowledgments

The WikiProject Brazil Schools extends its gratitude to Wikimedia Brasil, through the Grants and Programming Committees, for the opportunity to participate and collaborate at WikiCon Brazil 2025. Part of the activities developed by the WikiProject Brazil Schools received support from members of the WikiProject Hearing Health, who were funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP, grant no. 2024/04559-0).

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