GLAM/Newsletter/February 2023/Contents/New Zealand report
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Wikidata and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Wellington WikiCon 2023 and Auckland Museum local suburb project funding
BHL and Wikidata
A member of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, Ambrosia10 (Siobhan Leachman), is collaborating with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and assisting on a volunteer basis to improve BHL’s engagement with various Wiki projects. One of BHL’s recent initiatives made use of Wikidata and the Wikidata Query Service to assist in BHL’s round tripping of persistent identifiers relating to authors and creators in its catalogue. As part of this work, initiated as a result of requests by Ambrosia10 and Pigsonthewing, BHL added an author record sidebar exposing BHL’s author data and including hyperlinks to other authoritative knowledge bases. Many of these hyperlinks have been sourced from Wikidata and include any appropriate Wikidata Qids for creators in the BHL catalogue. JJ Dearborn, BHL’s data manager, and Ambrosia10 recently published a blog BHL is Round Tripping Persistent Identifiers with the Wikidata Query Service on this initiative. This blog provides more information on the motivation behind this initiative as well as how BHL undertook this work.
Wellington WikiCon 2023
The first WikiCon held in Wellington will take place 11–12 March 2023, at Our Lady’s Home of Compassion in Island Bay. The conference is designed for experienced Wikipedians as well as new people curious about the community. Conference sessions cover what gadgets people can add to make editing easier by Ambrosia10, what makes a good New Zealand suburb article from Prosperosity, why there are so few photographs in New Zealand articles Giantflightlessbirds and keynotes about Pasifika coverage in Wikipedia by Kowhaiarewhana and The Thesis Wikidata Project by DrThneed. In addition there is a group session about GLAM organisations and Wikipedia including Te Papa (the National Museum of New Zealand led by Einebillion.
Conference information: Wellington WikiCon 2023 The conference is organised by Lisa Maule and Sofia Roberts.
Auckland War Memorial Museum Local Suburb Project funding
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Late last year staff at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial applied for Wikipedia Alliance Funding to enhance local Auckland suburb pages for use as local history resources in the classroom for the new Aotearoa Histories Curriculum, building on our earlier successful Research Fund project Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum. The new curriculum, which starts this year, is the first time that there has been compulsory study of New Zealand history in primary, intermediate and secondary schools (years 1-10, ages 5-15). This is a huge opportunity for GLAM organisations to expand their audience of school-aged students and their teachers, as it has a strong local history aspect. Alongside understanding the big ideas of Aotearoa New Zealand history and developing critical thinking skills students are expected to understand and engage with their local contexts. However, in the research that we earlier undertook teachers told us that they are struggling to find suitable local history resources and we believe Wikipedia, particularly enhanced local suburb pages, can fill this gap, providing detailed historical narratives of local places that are well referenced, illustrated with rich imagery and point to further resources.
The funding we received will pay for our Wikipedian in Residence to continue his work enhancing local suburb pages and towards the end of this year sponsor a cohort of Wikipedia interns to join the Museum’s summer student programme, where we aim to introduce a diverse group of students to Wikipedia editing. We will also be running monthly meetups and edit-a-thons at the Museum for the local community and organising a series of workshops for GLAM professionals and other interested parties.
In January and February 2023 we've managed to get our West Auckland article improved to GA status, improved four suburb articles (Mount Roskill, Wesley, Waikowhai and Lynfield) and improved/created fifteen articles on natural features such as Whangateau Harbour and French Bay / Otitori Bay, major streets in Auckland (including Khyber Pass Road and Customs Street), and major local landmarks including Hoani Waititi Marae and St Andrew's First Presbyterian Church.
This stage of the project has focused on unlocking content on local history found in print books available through Auckland Libraries. Once these works have been processed, we'll start focusing on more of the major subregions of Auckland, beginning with South Auckland.
