GLAM/Newsletter/August 2022/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XII, Issue VIII, August 2022

New Zealand report

A Wikipedian at Large

End of the West Coast Project

The ten-week West Coast Wikipedian at Large project, sponsored by Development West Coast, has drawn to a close. It generated unusual levels of interest for a Wikimedia project, being covered three times on television, including a film crew interviewing Giantflightlessbirds in the bowels of the Hokitika Museum. To summarise the final report, the West Coast team of 11 widely-dispersed volunteers 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 to to Punakaiki, Lake Brunner, Haast, and Karamea. Most importantly, the project was an opportunity to connect with the people living in remote corners of the West Coast, who supplied information, rare print materials, and photos.

Cave Creek
Westland petrel / tāiko
Keri Hulme
Gouland Downs on the Heaphy Track
Fishing on Lake Brunner

No Numpties

Giantflightlessbirds is attending the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin as the New Zealand delegate, and was awarded a Paul Reynolds Scholarship by the library professionals body LIANZA to spend all of September in Europe. He'll be meeting with Wikipedians in Berlin, Prague, Utrecht, and Stockholm, focussed especially on GLAM projects using OpenRefine to upload to Commons. Case studies, tools, and ideas will be taken back to New Zealand and shared in workshops, conference presentations, and journal articles.

The Reynolds scholarship is also known as the "No Numpties" award (numpty is the 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.

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