GLAM/Newsletter/October 2021/Contents/New Zealand report
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Outreach by members of the Aotearoa New Zealand Wikimedia User Group
24-hour edit-a-thon on Ada Lovelace Day
On October 12th, volunteer Wikipedia editors in Aotearoa start an international 24-hour editing marathon to improve the coverage of women in Wikipedia. This Women in Red event began at midday in Aotearoa with a 10 hour editing session jointly run with Wikimedia Australia; the New Zealand coordinator was User:Pakoire. New Zealand passed the editing baton to Australia, and the event moved from time zone to time zone, finishing in New Zealand 24 hours later. Aotearoa has several editors active in Women in Red, who between them have run previous events to showcase women in the arts, history, science, and politics. This event was the first national Women in Red event in Aotearoa, and took place simultaneously in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and even Hokitika. We were luckily enough to undertaken radio publicity and picked up new volunteers from Massey University keen to work on academic biographies.
Wikidata Presentation to the Managers of Australasian Herbarium Collections (MAHC)
On October 21st Ambrosia10 gave a presentation to the Managers of Australasian Herbarium Collections (MAHC), a sub-committee of the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria (CHAH). She presented on Wikidata giving a live demonstration to the attendees on how to create a Wikidata item for botanists, botanical collectors and scientific journal articles. The aim was to show how, by adding collectors and publications to Wikidata, these linked open data can be used by all herbaria to improve the metadata relating to their herbarium collections. She demonstrated the Cradle tool showing the scientific collector form to give guidance on the type of data that might be added to Wikidata, the Wikidata Query Service giving some basic examples of queries that may be of interested to the managers, and demonstrated the Scholia tool showing visualisations of both a particular botanical researcher as well as visualisations for an institution. She also demonstrated how a Wikidata item for a deceased collector might be used in the website Bionomia to link the collector to the specimens they had collected, the data of which is stored in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Finally she shared previously created resources to help guide and support the managers when contributing to Wikidata. This presentation has subsequently led to a further invitation to present on Wikidata to the staff of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Victoria in the new year of 2022.
