Why is portuguese divided in two different languages? This makes maintenance and translations an ordeal, especially considering how close to each other they actually are.
Topic on Extension talk:UniversalLanguageSelector
Not really. If a message is translated the same way in the two variants, there is no need to translate it twice because MediaWiki uses language fallback to show the existing translation to users who choose the variant.
See also Topic:Thmnbxlkwt7z5rka.
Where do you see it?
I'm sorry for not being so specific; I was actually referring to the language selector right next to the user page link and the alerts icon, not to the one normally located on the sidebar. As you can see, Portuguese is currently divided in "português do Brasil" and "português", which cannot be justifiable when taking into account how similar to each other they actually are.
OK, so you are referring to the selector of the site's user interface language. This is expected behavior. In MediaWiki there are localizations for Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. This only refers to the user interface language of the site—the menus. Something like this is also available for English and British English and for some other pairs of language variants.
So this is not a Universal Language Selector issue.
If you think that MediaWiki's user interface should only be translated to one variant of Portuguese, that is an issue to discuss among Portuguese-speaking MediaWiki users and translators.