From late 2004, the edition grew rapidly. During May 2005, it overtook both the Spanish and Italian language Wikipedias. By comparison, in May 2004 it was only the 17th Wikipedia by the number of articles. Portuguese articles can contain variations of writing, as European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese have differences in vocabulary and usage. Articles can contain written characteristics of one or the other variant depending on who wrote the article. The Portuguese Wikipedia community decided not to split a separate Brazilian Portuguese version off from the Portuguese Wikipedia. In 2005, a proposal to fork Portuguese Wikipedia and create a Brazilian Portuguese version was voted down by the Wikimedia community. In 2007 another one to create European Portuguese was rejected too by the Wikimedia community. In 2009 another one to create in Brazilian Portuguese was rejected, but this time by language committee, according to new policies to create new Wikipedia editions, with the following explanation: "Brazilian Portuguese is not a separate language.. this is a requirement." Beginning in January 2007, the project experienced a decrease of the share of edits by unregistered users and an increase of the share of such edits being reverted, from about 15% to a peak of 25% in late 2008, which suggests an increase of disruptive editing. In the same month, a JavaScript was added that forced all unregistered users to preview their edit before saving it. In December 2010, the Portuguese Wikipedia overtook the Dutch language Wikipedia in number of articles, but in the first quarter of 2011 it was surpassed by the Russian and Dutch language Wikipedias, ranking in the tenth position. In April 2016, the project had 1388 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.
Characteristics
The Portuguese language Wikipedia is different from the English one in a number of aspects.
The articles for deletion process is not headed towards a consensus, but towards a proportion of votes. If the proportion of delete/keep votes reaches 2/3, the page is deleted, and the reverse applies just the same. This was decided via another voting process. The discussion page is kept for at least seven days, after which an administrator or eliminator will close the debate if the proportion has been reached. In case not, the discussion is prolonged for seven more days. Editors do not necessarily need to provide a reason for their vote, although they need to have the "right to vote". To earn this right, editors must be logged in, must have done a valid edit at least 90 days ago, and must have at least 300 valid edits.
Fair use images have always been forbidden. However, debates have been raised concerning the fair use policy, all of them failing to have the uploading of such images allowed. Actually, uploading pictures at the Portuguese Wikipedia has been fully disabled. In order to have a picture at an article, one must create an account at the Wikimedia Commons and then link it to the page. On-going campaigns are reuniting people in favour and against the usage of fair use. As of February 2009, the number of editors in favour is higher than the number of editors against it. In August 2009, though, a new debate was raised in order for users to approve or deny the creation of a policy of uploading fair use media. This debate resulted in 142 votes for "yes" against 120 votes for "no", which means the policy was approved. Now, it is implemented.
As much as the English language, Portuguese language also has significant regional differences on vocabulary, grammar and spelling. It is accepted that an article written in Brazilian Portuguese should be kept as it is, and the same applies to articles in European Portuguese. However, if one rewrites the article in another variant, but leave some words in the former variant, these words should be rewritten in accordance with the new version's variant of the article.
Completion of a CAPTCHA image was required for a user to make any edit if the user was not using a registered username. It was disabled on January 1, 2014.
In 2019 the Portuguese Wikipedia has 316 thousand unique categories and 3.57% of them do not have appropriate page in the category. The average article in this language version has 9 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.314. The largest number of articles has Arts and Geography category. In Portuguese Wikipedia articles related to Crime and Events has the highest average quality. Content about Health is read more often and articles in Business category have the highest authors' interest on average. In March 2020 the Portuguese Wikipedia contained 4.9 million references, wherein 1.71% of them had the DOI identifier and 5.33% of references contained the ISBN number. Total share of articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia with at least one reference was 71.22%. At the time it had 10.11% and 0.54% of articles with at least 10 and 100 references respectively.
