On May 30th, 2025, Wikimedia Brasil (WMB) published the results of the Lusophone technological wishlist proposals, an initiative that seeks to enumerate the necessities and priorities of the Portuguese-speaking community in the Wikimedia Movement technological area. The submitted proposals were evaluated by community peers and target goals from wikipedia robots to alternative texts produced by generative AI.
Wikimedia Brasil has been participating in Outreachy rounds and this time it could not be different. Outreachy is an internship program geared towards the participation of underrepresented communities in the technical industry. In this round, we decided to focus on the Lusophone technological wishlist proposals as our Outreachy project. The mentors of the project are Éder Porto, WMB Products and Technology Manager, and Artur Corrêa, WMB Project Assistant. The project was approved and soon after we began preparing the internship application.
After receiving applications from many countries, thoroughly analyzing them and returning feedback, the selected intern was Naomi Ibe, a back-end developer based in Nigeria. Together with Naomi, we analyzed the most voted proposals and prioritized the development of the reference archival Wikipedia bot. We considered that this proposal is aligned with Naomi’s technical background as well as being a reasonable project to develop during the Outreachy internship. Link rotting is real and we can lose references and Verifiability if links keep dying. Archiving them is an effective way of protecting the world’s knowledge.
Naomi elaborated a technical plan to tackle the proposal, breaking down the end goal into smaller steps. The mentors provided instruction on how to integrate into the Wikimedia development ecosystem: creating a developer account, logging in on Toolforge, cloning repositories, setting up git configuration, etc. Alongside that, we explored the functionalities related with the bot’s main features: link archival on Wayback Machine, which citation templates exist on the Portuguese Wikipedia and what are their parameters, how to get the Recent Changes from the Action API and how to parse MediaWiki text to look for templates.
We created a repository on Wikimedia Brasil’s GitHub and Naomi readily started working on it, developing the bot step by step. Our team meets twice a week. In the meeting, we analyze Naomi’s code, the current work plan, and discuss improvements, bug solving, and how to tackle the next features. The bot is currently able to poll recent changes, check citation templates, archive URLs if needed, produce an updated template and perform edits in the article, updating the templates.
For Naomi, working with WMB has tested the limits of what she thought she could do. She has written custom functions to fetch wikitext, parse citation templates, and archive links using the Wayback Machine and, in her words, “it feels surreal to see all those pieces coming together”. With the support of the mentors, the code was reviewed and analyzed in our meetings twice a week, discussing improvement points.
Naomi went through the developer experience we all as developers go through: being stuck for hours debugging why something does not work, only to realize the issue was something very simple like a missing comma or code formatting. Since the beginning, code coverage has been a priority, so Naomi wrote a lot of tests for the bot’s functionality.
It is truly fascinating for a new developer to build a real project and see it evolving how the bot is growing, especially given the fact that this project could potentially be replicated in other Wikis besides Portuguese Wikipedia. Naomi learned that, with persistence, time, and a little bit of curiosity, one can get through anything.
The bot was approved by the Portuguese Wikipedia community in March of 2026, and it is now running to keep making the lusophone Wikipedia references more reliable and verifiable. We would like to send a huge thanks to User:Stanglavine, who helped us with final adjustments and corrections to the bot.
You can check Naomi’s blog posts on https://techtalesbynaomi.hashnode.dev/ and keep yourself updated on the Lusophone technological wishlist proposals in its talk page.
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