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Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand/Annual Report 2022

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Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand Annual Report 2022

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User group

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The group proceeded with incorporation. Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand Incorporated Society (WANZ) was accepted into the society register in New Zealand on 7 April 2022 and registered with the New Zealand Charities register in August 2022, registration number CC6037.

 
Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand Committee at the end of the 28–29 May 2022 strategy weekend, beside the pool of the Brentwood Hotel, Kilbirnie, Wellington

The group elected the following representatives:

The User group applied for WMF general purpose funds for a year of activities and support for July 2022 – June 2023.

Given the time delay between the application due date (14 April 2022) and the date the funding was likely to be granted, and with the Committee keen to proceed with Incorporated Society set up, the committee applied for Rapid Grant funding to participate in a facilitated strategy weekend in Wellington.

The strategy workshop was held over a weekend and resulted in vigorous discussion and agreement, confirming:

  • the committee's values
  • a committee working agreement, covering
    • how we will communicate, where we communicate and acceptable cadence, how each of us will know when something is needed from us, and what language is acceptable
    • what tools we would use and need to develop, including a project management tool to keep us on task and achieving
    • when (every 2nd Monday of the month) and how (Zoom) we meet, and how we would record, distribute, and store our formal business documentation including agendas, minutes, policies and papers presented
  • the committee's strategic goals and key priority focus areas
  • the initial draft of our business plan for the 2022/23 year (conditional on funding being granted by the General Funds)
  • the initial draft and discussion on reporting – not only what is required for year 1 if we get the funding, but also what we want to record, analyse and bring into next time to improve
  • the committee parked the Communication Strategy, but agreed to make this a priority discussion to progress without out-of-cycle meetings

After successfully establishing a budget and receiving grant funding from ther Wikimedia Foundation, the Committee continued its work and

  • finalised the strategic plan, including conducting a consultation round with user group members ensuring community feedback was incorporated into the new strategy (Google Docs link to the strategy document)
  • supported the NZ Thesis Wikidata project (see below)
  • worked with Wikimedia Australia to offer a Wikidata Fellowship in 2023
  • set up a bank account for the incorporated society and applied to be registered for GST
  • drafted policies
  • established administration platforms for recording minutes and financials

Press and Promotion Highlights

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Financial support

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The User Group received it's first General support grant from ESEAP / Wikimedia Foundation in July of 2022.

Some individual editors have received in kind support such as fee waivers for conference attendence by conference organisers. Other individual organisers have received financial support from external organisations to advance their projects. Of particular note was the support of:

Conferences

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National Digital Forum, 23 February 2022

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With COVID19 Omicron variant cases increasing in the New Zealand community, 2022's National Digital Forum, the main New Zealand digital GLAM conference, moved online at a late phase of organisation. In-person tickets were converted to online registrations and participants were offered two additional places instead of a refund. Ambrosia10 had been awarded a WMF rapid grant to attend the conference, and allocated her two additional tickets to New Zealand editors Pakoire and Friagatewayfinder. Einebillion was also attending, and Giantflightlessbirds presented a lightning talk Wikimedia, GLAM + cultural heritage: the perfect combination! (YouTube Video). Noting there was little opportunity for networking in the conference schedule, the group of Wikimedia editors attending established on the spot an online chat room during breaks, and invited other attendees to meet with them and build relationships via the Twitter stream #NDF22 and on the online conference platform chat. Attendance at the chat room was light, but there was take-up at most breaks.

DigiKult2022, 7 April 2022

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WANZ member Ambrosia10 presented at the Nordic GLAM conference DigitKult2022 on GLAMs and Citizen Science: Encouraging and Enabling Participation (YouTube Video). Her presentation covered her use of and contributions to Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons when undertaking her citizen science work.

SPNHC2022, 5–10 June 2022

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Fake Muse SPNHC conference poster

The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections 2022 organising committee funded Ambrosia10 to virtually attend their annual conference. Ambrosia10 was a co-author of a poster, Fake Muse!, explaining work she and her co-authors had undertaken on plant genera named after women. Much of this research was collated via Wikidata. Ambrosia10 also engaged with the community on the virtual platform and provided virtual support during a conference workshop entitled People are unique, Unique people are priceless, in which participants were taught to edit Wikidata.

Wikimedia Summit and "No Numpties" grant, September 2022

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WANZ Vice-President Giantflightlessbirds attended the 9–11 September Wikimedia Summit in Berlin, the first New Zealand delegate to do so. He was awarded the 2022 Paul Reynolds Scholarship by the library professionals body LIANZA to cover travel and accommodation costs in Europe for the rest of September 2022, to spend time working with Wikimedia chapters in Utrecht, Stockholm, and Berlin, and attend the GLAM-WIKI coordinators meeting in Prague just after the Berlin summit. The goal of the grant was to get a better understanding of how the Wikimedia Movement is working with the GLAM sector in Europe, and learn some in-depth OpenRefine skills to bring back to Aotearoa and share. Giantflightlessbirds will be reporting back at the LIANZA and NDF conferences in 2023, and making a short video guide to the tools and techniques in use, to be posted to Commons and hosted on the Wikipedia Aotearoa New Zealand website that is being built.

The Paul Reynolds scholarship is also known as the "No Numpties" award (numpty is a Scots word for a fool). Reynolds was a tech commentator and supporter of open knowledge initiatives in the GLAM sector who died in 2010; bequests and gifts were used to set up the award to encourage New Zealanders to learn digital skills overseas.

BioDigiCon 2022, 27–29 September 2022

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Ambrosia10 virtually attended BioDigiCon 2022 from 27–29 September 2022 to remain up to date on how natural environment GLAM organisations are using data, and how this could be integrated into Wikidata. She continued to promote the use of Wikidata as a linking mechanism for collectors and natural environment specialists. She also advocated for the wider editing of various language Wikipedias to aid the spread of knowledge about biodiversity.

TDWG 2022, 17–21 October 2022

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Ambrosia10 obtained funding from the Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand Inc to virtually attend the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) 2022 conference as part of her efforts to encourage and support the biodiversity community engaging with Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons. At TDWG 2022 a recently published article Ambrosia10 had co-authored, "The disambiguation of people names in biological collections", was presented by the lead author Quentin Groom. There was also a presentation on the People in Paleontology workshop (mentioned below) along with the release of the Paleontology group's Guidelines for Using Wikidata to Mobilize Information about People in Collections: A Paleontology Perspective (also co-authored by Ambrosia10). At TDWG 2022 another presentation was given by German Wikimedian S.v.Mering about her and her colleagues' efforts to add collectors from the Natural History Museum, Berlin to Wikidata. This project is part of the Museum's efforts to begin decolonising their museum data. From learning about this effort at TDWG 2022 conference, Ambrosia10 was able to assist both at the training session held prior to the editathon as well as at the two-day editathon itself.

Worlds of Wikimedia Conference, 17–18 November 2022

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Pakoire and Kowhaiarewhana presented about the Pacific Arts Aotearoa Project at the two-day WOW 2022 Worlds of Wikimedia Conference in Sydney. Several other members of WANZ committee attended, including Einebillion, Giantflightlessbirds, as well as the New Zealand editors Kowhaiarewhana and Stitchbird2.

ESEAP 2022, 18–20 November 2022s

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Women in Red editors at ESEAP 2022

A large contingent of New Zealand editors attended the regional East and South-East Asia and Pacific (ESEAP) 2022 conference, the first for several years. They included Einebillion, Giantflightlessbirds, Stitchbird2, Pakoire, Kowhaiarewhana, Chocmilk03, and Beeswaxcandle. This was the first time more than one or two New Zealanders had attended a hub-level Wikimedia Foundation meeting, and at the opening cultural performance the Aotearoa attendeed performed a waiata. During the conference Einebillion took part in a panel on affiliate leadership development, Giantflightlessbirds presented a range of Commons tools, and Beeswaxcandle ran a practical Wikisource workshop; the full report from the user group is available here.

Wellington WikiCon

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This event, a follow up for the successful 2021 Hokitika and Wellington WikiCons earlier in 2021, was cancelled due to restrictions in response to an outbreak of the COVID-19 Delta variant in Auckland. The event has been rescheduled for 11–12 March 2023.

Wikimedia community support

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Community meetups

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Regular meetups were held during the year, both online and in person, around New Zealand. These included:

  • Aotearoa New Zealand Online Meetup: monthly online meetings open to everyone across the country, including regular attendees from Australia. The first 15 minutes is allocated to Aotearoa New Zealand User Group business. 12 meetings held, 139 total attendances
  • Wellington Meetup: monthly meetings in person (or online if required by New Zealand COVID-19 Alert Levels). 12 meetings held, 75 total attendances
  • Auckland Meetup: meetings are occurring more regularly for Auckland during 2022 thanks to significant support from Auckland Museum staff. 3 meetings held, 12 total attendances
  • Christchurch Meetup: meetings are occurring semi-regularly. 3 meetings held, 11 total attendances
  • West Coast Meetup: meetings are occurring semi regularly. 3 meetings held (2 online and 1 in person), 11 total attendances

Note that total number attending include multiple counts of individuals, as they are counted for each meeting they attended.

WANZ social media activity

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  • Facebook private User group: group is used to assist editors and promote Wikipedia events and meet-ups. 195 members as at 31 December 2022.
  • Facebook public page: this was created with the goals of raising awareness of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in New Zealand, showcasing New Zealand content and highlighting opportunities for people to get involved. 228 likes at 31 December 2022.
  • Twitter. The Wikimedia Aotearoa twitter handle has 245 followers and continues to actively post and share information.

Training

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In July 2022 Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand vice president Giantflightlessbirds coordinated with Sandra Fauconnier, OpenRefine’s project director, to provide training on uploading images to Wikimedia Commons for interested Wikipedians and staff from Auckland Museum and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The group jointly edited the training notes (Google Doc).

Giantflightlessbirds also ran online training sessions for new editors as part of the West Coast Wikipedian at Large and Critter of the Week projects (see below). In conjunction with Wikimedia Australia, he developed a set of open-licensed Wikimedia Movement, Wikipedia, and Wikidata training modules with slides, scripts, and practical activities.

Outreach, events, and major projects

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Overarching Campaign Dashboard for events, projects, and editathons supported by WANZ

Pacific Arts Aotearoa Project, December 2021 – April 2022

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The Pacific Arts Aotearoa Project led by Pakoire included a pilot residency component (Wikipedian in Residence) with Creative New Zealand. The project started in December 2021 and finished on 24 April 2022. There were two goals: one was to increase content on notable Pacific Island artists in Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons, with a target of 50% new articles being women or non-binary people; the other was to introduce Wikipedia editing to Pacific Island editors and communities, with outreach targets also part of the project. Each of the three new editors talked to people in Pacific Island arts communities in Aotearoa about editing in Wikipedia.

 
Kowhaiarewhana and Pakoire presenting on the project at WOW 2022

Through its Pacific Arts Wikipedian in Residence pilot, Creative New Zealand aimed to amplify globally the profile of its Arts Pasifika Award winners and other notable Pacific Island artists, increasing knowledge of their creative careers and the valuable contribution they make to Aotearoa New Zealand. Through the pilot, CNZ supported three Pasifika artists to become Wikipedia editors, documenting the stories of its Arts Pasifika Award winners and other notable Pacific Island artists, while also building and developing capability through their increased knowledge and skills, and shared professional development. The new editors were:

The residency contributed to Creative New Zealand’s work to develop ‘Tagata’ arts leadership, a strategic focus of its Pacific Arts Strategy 2018–2023, and is part of its #DigitalMoana response to the impacts of COVID-19.

The project successfully trained three new editors and these Wikipedians in Residence and the project lead together:

  • created 18 new articles
  • improved 3 articles

Creative New Zealand published a blog post on the project.

The project also attracted a fourth new editor User:Poly_eyes.

A meeting between the project lead Pakoire and Rachel Yates, Curator Pacific Cultures, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa during the project prompted Rachel to consider the focus of her curatorial work. She recognised there was significant value in publishing her research in blogs and peer-reviewed journal articles to act as secondary sources for Wikipedia editors to write about makers, often invisible outside of their own community spaces. Wikimedia Foundation projects are now considered and documented when this curator plans her research outputs. In May 2022 a discussion between Rachel Yates and Einebillion resulted in a commitment to create Wikidata items for historic makers of Pacific art. Rachel is in the research phase of this project, so it could take until mid-2023 to eventuate into published outputs.

International Women's Day Weekend Editathon, 5–6 March 2022

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To acknowledge International Women's Day on Tuesday, 8 March the New Zealand Wikipedia User group held a weekend-long virtual edit-a-thon on 5 and 6 March 2022. It was facilitated by Pakoire and Ambrosia10 and was held online on Zoom so people could participate for any length of time that suited them, from anywhere around New Zealand, and could come and go during the session. There were at least two facilitated catch-up times a day, morning and afternoon, to enable users to get any support they might need and to provide a more social aspect to the virtual event. It was an extremely successful weekend, with 16 editors adding 42 new Wikipedia articles, improving 349 Wikipedia articles, uploading 51 new Commons images, and making numerous edits of Wikidata. The dashboard for the event can be seen here. There was great promotion of the event on Twitter and Facebook prior to and during the event.

National Herbarium of Victoria Wikidata Workshop, 16 March 2022

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Ambrosia10 gave a virtual workshop to the employees and other botanists associated with the National Herbarium of Victoria, on Wikidata and how to create Wikidata items for collectors of specimens—see the Wikidata editor Drechmeria-RBGV's page for more information on this project.. Since this workshop the National Herbarium of Victoria has undertaken a project to add more women collectors to Wikidata.

Using Wikidata to Capture and Share Information about People in Paleontology, 29–31 March 2022

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From March 29–31 Ambrosia10 participated in and supported the attendees of an iDigBio three day workshop encouraging paleontologists, museum curators and collection managers to add data about people in paleontology to Wikidata. It was an extremely productive workshop with approximately 30 attendees. On the first day Jessica Utrup took the participants through an introduction to editing Wikidata. On the second day Erica Krimmel gave an introduction to the group on how to bulk edit Wikidata via Open Refine. On the third day the group collaborated on creating documentation giving guidelines for adding paleontology people to Wikidata, expanding and improving on documents originally created by Ambrosia10.

WeDigBio event and subsequent WeDigBio: A Wikidata empowered workflow publication 20 April 2022

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Ambrosia10 participated in the WeDigBio transcription of specimen labels campaign and completed a twitter thread on her expanded workflow using Wikidata. She was asked by the WeDigBio organisers to write a blog on her workflow, aimed at encouraging WeDigBio participants to replicate her work, and then invited to write and publish this workflow as a Diff post informing the wider Wikimedia community. As a result of this outreach Ambrosia10 was approached to contribute to a 2022 Biology and Mathematics Educators (BIOME) Institute Hidden Figures Workshop (see below).

Joint #1Lib1Ref campaign with Wikimedia Australia, 15 May – 5 June 2022

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WANZ members Giantflightlessbirds, DrThneed and Ambrosia10 collaborated with Wikimedia Australia members to help organise and support a joint #1Lib1Ref campaign. Six virtual events were held, helping librarians from both countries learn how to add citations to Wikipedia. Ambrosia10 reported back on the campaign in the May GLAMwiki newsletter. The Knowledge and Information specialists from Te Aka Matua Research Library at Te Papa joined the campaign for the first time. Three Te Papa staff participated including WANZ President Einebillion; the other two staff were new editors.

West Coast Wikipedian at Large, 20 June – 26 August 2022

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The second West Coast Wikipedian at Large project by Giantflightlessbirds, sponsored again by Development West Coast, generated unusual levels of interest for a Wikimedia project, being covered three times on television including a TV interview in the bowels of the Hokitika Museum. Over ten weeks he West Coast team of 11 volunteers in Australia and New Zealand made 974 edits to 193 articles, adding 73,800 words and 653 citations. They created 25 articles from scratch, five appearing in Did You Know, and one being among the most viewed of August 2022. Over 1100 images were uploaded as part of the project, most of them original photos taken on site during field trips ranging over 600 km to Punakaiki, Lake Brunner, Haast, and Karamea. Giantflightlessbirds was joined in Karamea by two volunteers from Wellington (WANZ committee member Marshelec and partner) and together they hiked 10 km to photograph native forest and crawl through three caves (encountering New Zealand's largest spider) to create an article on the Fenian Track. There was online training for new editors and Wikimedia Commons photographers, and two online wikiblitz sessions. The project was also an opportunity to connect with the people living in remote corners of the West Coast, who supplied information, rare print materials, and photos. The full report can be found here.

  • Photos from the West Coast Wikipedian at Large project
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    Mt Uriah
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    Paparoa National Park
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    Punakaiki Cavern
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    Penguin Crossing
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    Lake Ellery

2022 Biology and Mathematics Educators (BIOME) Institute Hidden Figures Workshop July 2022 and resulting working group

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On Thursday the 21st of July 2022 Ambrosia10 co-presented a workshop titled Revealing Hidden Figures within Natural History Collections Through Data Sleuthing workshop. Slides for this workshop can be found here. The intention of this workshop was to educate participants in Wikidata and the workflows that use the Wikidata item to link natural history specimens to their collectors, particularly to historically overlooked collectors or collectors from marginalised groups. The workshop also had the aim of recruiting educators keen to participate in a subsequent BIOME working group adapting this workflow to be part of a course or CURE, a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience. Subsequent to this workshop a BIOME working group was formed that included Ambrosia10 along with 5 other participants. The group is meeting every two weeks and is currently working on producing that CURE.

2022 Women in STEAM Ada Lovelace Editathon, Wellington 8 October 2022

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In honour of Ada Lovelace Day 2022 Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand held an "in-person" editing event at the Home of Compassion in Wellington to improve the coverage of New Zealand women in Wikipedia. The event was organised by AtticEdit, Pakoire and Ambrosia10. 13 editors attended including 2 new editors. At least 6 new articles were created, multiple articles were improved and many Wikidata items were edited. The dashboard for the event can be seen here.

Biodiversity Heritage Library Cataloguing Group meeting 18 November 2022

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Ambrosia10 was invited by the BHL cataloguing group to present on how she uses BHL content in Wikipedia, Wikidata and WikiCommons. Members of the cataloguing group had recently completed a WikiEdu course on Wikidata and wanted to discuss workflows and ask questions. At the end of the meeting Ambrosia10 was invited and agreed to join the BHL cataloguing group and attend subsequent meetings to assist with the group's efforts to improve the interlinking between the various Wikimedia projects and BHL.

New Zealand Wikidata Thesis Project: Connecting New Zealand dissertations to the world

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Background on this project and an update were published in the March GLAMwiki newsletter. In short, the project involves taking metadata for approximately 66,000 theses from 13 New Zealand educational institutions and uploading it to Wikidata, and citing the theses on Wikipedia where relevant (e.g. when the author has a Wikipedia page). It is the first project to upload dissertations data for a nation, and also possibly the first multi-institutional collaboration for thesis data.

Data cleaning and upload A grant application for the datacleaning work was submitted as part of the Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand project grant. The grant proposal was successful and data cleaning was carried out by DrThneed. A report on the data cleaning work was submitted to WANZ in November 2022. DrThneed uploaded 66,225 thesis items using OpenRefine by July 2022. The schema included a limited list of properties, which was subsequently expanded (see the full schema for thesis, author and advisor on Wikidata).

At the time of upload DrThneed had matched nearly 6500 theses to their authors on Wikidata, and this number now stands at just over 7500. Subsequent activity has matched some main subjects, based on controlled vocabularies, and added advisor information for a further 17,000 theses so far. In total more than 10,000 individual people have been disambiguated, and just under 70,000 new Wikidata items created. DrThneed created a Mix’n’match catalogue for every thesis that did not have a matched author on upload.

DrThneed has created a Wikipedia project page, detailing the outline of the project, and a Wikidata project page, where she has put project dashboards, useful queries and data visualisations such as a Histropedia timeline, maps and advisor–student graphs. The linkage of such a large number of authors and advisors allows some interesting queries to be run, such as what does a tree of the longest chain of doctoral students/advisors look like, who has supervised the most master's theses, what awards have people won?

Controlled vocabularies Some of the thesis data uses controlled vocabularies to describe the thesis subjects. DrThneed coordinated a small group of interested Australian and New Zealand editors to work on the 2008 and 2020 ANZSRC controlled vocabularies, which were partially matched in Wikidata. Although the vocabularies are not complete yet, Zeborah identified all the terms in the 2020 vocabulary that are used in the thesis metadata, enabling them all to be matched, and we are working on the remaining terms in the 2008 vocabulary.

Outreach Meetings were held with the academic librarians from the institutions involved in March and July, and users Zeborah, DrThneed and Ambrosia10 presented the project at the Open Repository Days in September. DrThneed also presented the project to the Australian Wikimedia Community meeting in October, and encouraged anyone there who might want to get theses into Wikidata to get in touch. DrThneed made a presentation for YouTube in July.

During the project DrThneed noticed that the Altmetrics tool was not picking up citations made on Wikipedia using the CiteQ tool. She has communicated with Altmetrics about whether it is possible for them pick up these missing citations, and will continue working on this in the coming year.

Internationally, DrThneed has collaborated with HelsKRW at the London School of Economics, who has been doing similar work for her institution, and provided technical support to teach Wikidata to librarian ThalassaLib who then uploaded 650 theses from the Hopkins Marine Laboratory at Stanford. A German student completing a PhD on thesis data got in touch with DrThneed after viewing the YouTube presentation.

Future work The project continues with matching of people (authors and advisors) and main subjects. DrThneed is exploring possibilities to talk about the project at universities and engage new editors in the project. She is also planning to talk about the project at the Wikimedia Aotearoa NZ meeting in Wellington in March 2023, and is keen to continue to make connections to other editors working with thesis data. Zeborah has been working on a process to feed thesis metadata from the OAI feed into Wikidata via OpenRefine in a streamlined way, so that thesis metadata can continue to be added to Wikidata directly by the institutions. Project members have discussed some publications that could arise out of the project and will be working on these in the New Year.

Encouraging GLAM contributions: Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum

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Engagement

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The User Group considers the relationship with Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum to be a high strategic priority as Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum is investing significantly in engaging and contributing to Wikimedia Foundation projects and is lead exemplar for this type of GLAM Wiki engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Committee members from Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand met with Auckland Museum staff on 23 June 2022 to

  • update Auckland Museum on the confirmed strategy of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand and how the Board views Auckland Museum's strategy / activities
  • discuss next-steps support Auckland Museum needs from the WANZ group
  • support for the newly formed Auckland Meetup

Meeting notes are available https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_2WXXjtw7qEBCfxFqHGsbxotCe3skRUnHIQEOIzQ6Yo/edit?usp=sharing

A second meeting between Einebillion and James Taylor, Auckland Museum was held on 13 September 2022 to discuss Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum's re-application to ESEAP for project funding and the steps members of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand could take to support Auckland Museum and coordinate participation. Meeting notes are available https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SkCWVVP1NzheveiNcGAeTCrNGPboFxMePmVTsIyGO6A/edit?usp=sharing

A meeting was held between Ambrosia10 and James Taylor, Online Collections Information and Partnerships Manager, Prosperosity, the Auckland Museum Wikipedian in Residence, Brodie Hoare, Online Collections Data Analyst and Kelly Hall, BHL coordinator on the 10th of November 2022 to discuss the reuse of Biodiversity Heritage Library content in Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons. Ambrosia10 produced this document on her reuse of BHL content in English Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons to assist attendees of the meeting.

The wider User Group strongly supported the Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum's reapplication to ESEAP for project funding for the Understanding Our Past Project due to commence in 2023.

Contributions

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A major focus of Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum is improving location information on Wikipedia in the Auckland Region. In 2023, a new history curriculum will be introduced to New Zealand schools. By adding quality history sources to Auckland Region Wikipedia pages, the Museum hopes to empower students and teachers to learn more about their history, and give them the tools to undertake more detailed research. The Museum successfully applied for a Wikimedia grant to investigate this subject, partnering with lecturer and Museum curriculum developer Dr Mark Sheehan to investigate secondary school teachers' attitudes on using Wikipedia as a resource for teaching the new curriculum. In December 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation awarded the Museum a grant to greatly expand this project in 2023. The Wikimedia User Group strongly supports this project.

In 2022, the focus was on West Auckland. A brand new subregion page was created, and articles on major suburbs Avondale, Glen Eden, Henderson, New Lynn and Swanson were greatly improved, as well as 24 new and/or improved articles on natural features in West Auckland. In 2023, work will focus on the remaining major subregions of Auckland, major suburbs, and empowering summer students to develop articles on their own communities with the help of the Wikimedia User Group.

In addition to work on suburbs, the Museum had a number of other focuses for 2022:

  • Biographies: Museum staff and volunteers created or greatly improved 51 New Zealand biography articles, more than three times what was achieved in 2021. Of these articles, 28 were written for WikiProject Women in Red.
  • Biodiversity: 53 new biodiversity articles created in 2022 as a part of the project, primarily New Zealand mollusc species.
  • From April, the museum resumed Auckland Wiki meetups (in-person events were held in May and June). Meet-ups were paused to reassess the best strategies to engage and grow the community, and these will begin again in 2023.
  • The museum began work on comprehensively creating and improving museum-related publications in Wikidata, such as the Bulletin of the Auckland Museum and books published by museum staff and researchers, linking to public domain (or publicly accessible) copies of the content where possible, such as works hosted on the Biodiversity Heritage Library. So far, this work has actively benefited two projects: biodiversity articles/items, and the New Zealand Wikidata Thesis Project. If the first valid description of a species was described in a work, this can easily be added to Wikipedia pages using CiteQ, or for Wikidata items on taxa, adding the work's Wikidata item as a reference. If an author of a museum-related work had published a thesis at a New Zealand university, the author and thesis items could be linked. This aids with reducing disambiguation of New Zealand academics on Wikidata, creating more enriched Wikidata items, and aids in projects such as Women in Red, as many of these authors can now appear on redlists generated from Wikidata. As of December 2022, Wikidata items have been created for
  • 561 articles from the Records of Auckland Museum (most pre-existing due to Jstor)
  • 20 monographs from the Bulletin of the Auckland Museum
  • 106 works authored by Thomas Cheeseman.
  • All works uploaded by the museum to the BHL
  • 112 issues of the Auckland War Memorial Museum magazine
  • 65 books and notebooks (either published by the Museum, written by a museum-related figure, or uploaded to the BHL by the Museum).
  • Auckland Museum manages Online Cenotaph, an extensive biographical database of people who served for Aotearoa New Zealand, including major conflicts such as World War II. In 2022, over 500 people (most of whom have Wikipedia articles) had their Online Cenotaph entries linked to their Wikidata items, helping facilitate future data projects.
  • In late 2022, the museum hired Brodie-Jean Hoare as a full-time Online Collections Data Analyst. Wikimedia is the largest online collections partner of the museum (most of the views and engagement with the museum's content come from Wikipedia), meaning much of Brodie's role will be to better integrate museum content with Wikimedia, such as developing tools to batch upload CC-BY and public domain images from Collections Online.
  • Extensive work was done on the upcoming Auckland Museum Wikipedia Strategy, a follow-up to the 2020 report by Mike Dickison, reviewing the progress the museum has made on this strategy, and identifying what future strategies the museum will use.

Encouraging GLAM contributions: New Zealand Parliamentary Library

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A number of meetings were held between Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand user group members and the Parliamentary librarians. This relationship will continue to be a focus of the user group during 2023.

Encouraging GLAM contributions: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

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Engagement

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The User Group considers the relationship with Te Papa to be a high strategic priority as Te Papa is the national museum and national art gallery for New Zealand and engagement with Wikimedia Foundation projects by that institution will strongly influence other GLAM institutions within New Zealand. For the sake of transparency: Einebillion, President of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand is an employee of Te Papa and has been advocating for more engagement with Wikimedia Foundation projects.

In April 2022 Ambrosia10 met with new editor Stitchbird2 and Einebillion to develop a Wikipedia work programme for Stitchbird2 to deliver on related to her subject matter expertise in Myosotis. Stitchbird2 has advanced quickly in their editing expertise and their outreach work on Wikimedia Foundation projects is of high quality. This editor has become a strong advocate for Wikimedia Foundation projects both within Te Papa and with her wider scientific community. Ambrosia10 continues to mentor new editor Stitchbird2 In May 2022 Einebillion organised a small group of staff to contribute to the 1Lib1Ref campaign. This was the second year a 1Lib1Ref session was instigated. While the contributions were small in number the session built the awareness of the 1Lib1Ref campaign and usefulness of Wikidata and Wikipedia within Te Papa.

Contributions

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Throughout 2022 Te Papa increased its engagement with both the User Group and the Wikimedia Foundation projects. The appointment of a fixed term Digital Channels Outreach Manager has been key to Te Papa increasing it's engagement and contributions. In March 2022 Te Papa launched its GLAM Wiki project page. Administration of this page was adopted by the Digital Channels Outreach Manager Avocadobabygirl in September 2022.

During the final quarter of 2022 Avocadobabygirl led Te Papa's Myosotis pilot project. The Te Papa team wanted to find out how they could effectively and sustainably contribute to Wiki projects using Te Papa's collection images, metadata, and curatorial knowledge. The team consisted of Avocadobabygirl, Stitchbird2, and Te Papa's Collections Data Manager. Myosotis was selected as this work would support the established work programme of Stitchbird2. They used OpenRefine to load 355 images of Myosotis specimens native to Aotearoa New Zealand and focused work on ensuring the structured metadata of image contributions was of the highest quality. This pilot project created a reusable process that involves adding well-described content, improving and creating articles, and connecting with structured metadata. This process is not only reuseable by Te Papa but could easily be repurposed for other GLAM or research institutions to complete similar work.

The project:

Wikipedia / Radio New Zealand Critter of the Week Project

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Giantflightlessbirds continued to coordinate and expand the Critter of the Week Project. Critter of the Week is a long-running and popular Radio New Zealand show in which Nicola Toki (originally of the Department of Conservation, now head of Forest & Bird) and the host Jesse Mulligan talk about New Zealand species both endangered and neglected. It has been running since 2015: on 9 December 2022, the pot-bellied seahorse Hippocampus abdominalis was the subject of the 300th episode. Almost from the start Giantflightlessbirds and other volunteers have been creating or improving the corresponding Wikipedia article for each species to coincide with the Friday broadcast. This was initialy coordinated through Twitter; a project page was created in 2017 (and now contains a more accurate episode list than Radio New Zealand's own website). In 2022 Giantflightlessbirds set up a mailing list, and the 15 volunteers subscribed receive advance notice of the week's species. Online training was run this year for volunteers new to Wikipedia. The programme's illustrator, cartoonist Giselle Clarkson, was persuaded to release a selection of art under an open CC license, now being used for the project banner and Talk page awards. A new initiative for 2022 was awarding the year's most productive volunteer a small prize: a tea towel printed with Clarkson's artwork. Wikipedia volunteers are regularly acknowledged on-air as part of the team helping increase public awareness of New Zealand's endangered species.

West Coast Wikisource Project

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Beautiful Shells of New Zealand (1908) by E.G.B. Moss, digitised as part of the West Coast Task Force and the Auckland Museum BHL project

Giantflightlessbirds continued to coordinate the digitisation, upload, transcription, correction and publication of out-of-copyright books related to the West Coast of New Zealand to Wikisource. In 2022 this project was supported by the Grey District Library and a small grant from the Mātātuhi Foundation, recruiting a team of volunteers including several West Coast locals new to Wikisource. Completed books (18 to date) were added to Portal:New Zealand, and simultaneously released as borrowable EPUBs from South Island member libraries via OverDrive – as far as we can tell, a first for any Wikisource project.

The poet and travel writer Blanche Baughan has just been the subject of a biography (Enough Horizon by Carol Markwell) but her work is entirely out of print; thanks to this project there are now five collections of her poems or short stories available for loan or in progress, and six more scheduled. The amateur historian Vonnie Alexander, now over 90, wrote a 2010 local history Gillespies Beach Beginnings that had a small print run and was almost completely unavailable; we were able to tell her that thanks to Wikisource her book was now being widely read.

A comment from the head of Westland District Library: "These titles have not been read in physical format from this library and are unlikely to be widely available. This project has definitely increased access to local history information. Gillespies Beach Beginnings has had significant readership across the South Island, using the e-book platform, but our Reference copy here in the library has not been out."

Improving coverage of New Zealand topics

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Prosperosity has been improving the coverage of recent films of New Zealand origin, waiata (Māori-language songs) and people associated with these films and songs. Articles were created for the six most commercially successful films (Dame Valerie Adams: More than Gold, Gloriavale, Mister Organ, Muru, Nude Tuesday, Whina) and new articles were created for directors Tweedie Waititi, Tearepa Kahi, Paula Whetu Jones and Armağan Ballantyne.

Six articles were created for Māori-language songs: "Ka Mānu", "Kotahitanga", "Matemateāone", "Raupatu", "Taera" and "Tukituki Te Manawa", while six articles were created (or greatly improved) for musicians who sing in reo Māori: Dudley Benson, Coterie, Troy Kingi, Melodownz, Rob Ruha and Niko Walters.

Prosperosity also focused on improving coverage for New Zealand authors, by creating Wikidata items for all people who had won an award at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and for attendees of the Samesame but Different LGBTQIA+ Writers and Readers Festival.

Jonathanischoice has continued improvement of NZ wine-related articles, particularly the en:New Zealand wine article, with a long-term view to getting it reviewed for GA.

DrThneed has matched a number of lists of people to Wikidata and created items for missing people, including the 2018–2022 Queen's Birthday Honours Lists, the complete list of Rhodes Scholars for New Zealand, all Fellows of the Academy of New Zealand Literature, all winners of the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement, and the awards and notable alumni for the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand. DrThneed has also maintained the Female professors in New Zealand Listeria page, and added new men and women professors and associate professors from New Zealand institutions to Wikidata when promotion announcements are made, and created thirteen Wikipedia pages for notable women professors. She also wrote on Twitter about why universities should make press announcements about their promotions (Google doc here as Twitter links aren't currently working). She also added all Fellows of the Royal Society Te Apārangi to Wikidata and wrote Wikipedia pages to ensure that every woman FRSNZ has a biography (for now!). She is in the process of uploading to Wikimedia Commons several hundred photos from the Royal Society Te Apārangi honours events in November, from which many headshots will be available for New Zealand scientists. These will link to the list of RSNZ award winners she has already uploaded to Wikidata. DrThneed also wrote three articles on past New Zealand Director-Generals of Education Bill Renwick, Keith Sheen and Ned Dobbs, and featured them all on "Did You Know". She also rewrote the Wikipedia page for a significant local museum, Olveston.

Marshelec was one of the main contributors to creating and improving articles during the West Coast Wikipedian at Large project, and as part of that work, recognised that there was no article for a significant tramping track in the Kahurangi National Park. He created a new article for the Wangapeka Track in August 2022, and has taken this through the WP:GAN process, so that by year-end it was classified as a Good article.

Ambrosia10 continues to work on adding New Zealand moth species to Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

Jonathanischoice has focused on the improvement of articles on musical instruments.

Requested photographs in New Zealand

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Prosperosity has been working towards properly categorising all of the Wikipedia requested photographs in New Zealand, and attempting to find photos for every locality and endemic species in Aotearoa.

Step one of this project was to systematically check every article on a location in the Auckland Region, and mark with the Wikipedia requested photographs in Auckland if needed. Following this, new images were taken for the localities (or sourced from archives and/or Flickr), reducing the number of requested images for the region to 229 (despite a large number of new articles in 2022). Large sections of Auckland now have no images needed at all, including the Auckland CBD and most of West Auckland.

Step two was to expand this project to the other regions of New Zealand, systematically checking every location articles in the country and categorising the articles by region. This has created a useful resource for edit-a-thons (i.e. identifying which articles in an area need photos).

Step three focused on Wikipedia requested images of New Zealand biota - most articles on New Zealand fauna now have been checked to see if images are needed for the article. Images were added to a great number of articles, primarily from museum archives (Auckland War Memorial Museum and Te Papa), and via Flickr.

Future steps of this project include:

  • Sorting all endemic flora, and adding requested image templates for anything lacking an image.
  • Identifying endemic species not properly categorised on Wikipedia/Wikidata and adding images.
  • Fixing geocoordinate data for rivers and bodies of water (most articles use incorrect data, sourced from the widescale creation of bot articles for the Cebuano Wikipedia).
  • Identifying topics that will potentially have articles in the future, and photographing them before they are made.
  • Encouraging local communities (such as libraries and historical societies) to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons of important features
  • Organising edit-a-thons and targeted campaigns for poorly photographed areas (such as the Canterbury Region, which currently has 394 articles requiring photos).


Hours contributed by writers

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User:Ambrosia10: 1.5 hours

Einebillion (talk): 5 hours

Giantflightlessbirds: 3 hours

DrThneed: 2.5 hours

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