GLAM/Newsletter/August 2025/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue VIII, August 2025

New Zealand report

NZ species edit-a-thons, a scholarly article, a course, and Auckland Museum editors at Wikimania

New Zealand Species Edit-a-thons 2025

Three editors from Wellington, Ambrosia10, Stitchbird2 and Noracrentiss, obtained financial and administrative support from Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand to provide two edit-a-thons to train new and existing Wikipedia editors in improving New Zealand species articles. These events were held at Ōtari-Wilton's Bush on the 2nd and 9th of August.

The events were well attended with a total of 12 editors on the first day and 15 editors on the second day. These editors improved a total of 145 Wikipedia articles during the two events. More data on both events have been collated on the event dashboards which can be seen at this link for the 2nd of August and this link for the 9th of August events.

Images were also taken during the edit-a-thons by User:Quilt Phase and these, as well as a the slides created for the presentations given during the edit-a-thons, have been uploaded into this Wikimedia Commons category.

A report about these events has been prepared with information on both the achievements as well as recommendations on improvements to the event. This report has been submitted to the Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand committee and has been uploaded into the above Wikimedia Commons category.

Scholarly article published

Ambrosia10 has collaborated with several colleagues working in the natural history education sphere to create and have published a scholarly article outlining how to assist students in learning to improve their data sleuthing skills, including using Wikidata. The article titled Revealing hidden figures within natural history collections by empowering students with data sleuthing skills was published on the 30th of August.

The Commons Workflow as a short online course

In April Giantflightlessbirds ran a workshop on adding photos to Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and ultimately Wikipedia. It touched on Freedom of Panorama, moveClaim, DuplicateReferences, WikiShootMe, galleries, CropTool, the Volunteer Response Team, and negotiating a licence change. The response to the workshop was so positive he turned into an online webinar series, aimed at beginners who have done some Wikipedia editing or photo uploading but want to build their skills; Wikipedia editors who don’t really upload many photos, or Commons photographers who are not sure exactly what Wikidata is for. The course runs on the 1st, 8th, and 15th of October, 7pm NZDT (or 0600 UTC). The three sessions cost NZ$20 to register online.

Auckland Museum at Wikimania 2025

From August 5th to 9th, Wikimedian in Residence, Anjuli Selvadurai and Online Collections Data Analyst, Brodie Hoare attended Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya. They both received full scholarships from the Wikimedia Foundation to travel and attend the annual conference and were joined a group of over 700 attendees from across the globe.

Anjuli and Brodie attended GLAM and technical related talks and shared the work being done at Auckland Museum with conference attendees. Brodie took part in the Hack-a-thon over the course of the conference and Anjuli attended presentations about GLAM, education and youth engagement.

In an exciting end to the conference, Anjuli’s poster about the Wikipedia Summer Student programme at Auckland Museum won best poster for excellent content and design.

Before heading to Wikimania, Anjuli hosted a presentation with The University of Auckland's Art History Society where they learnt about how Wikimedia platforms function in GLAM and taught students how to set up their own accounts and start editing!

Following the conference, Brodie (User:Dactylantha) presented at Wiki Mentor Africa: Tool Spotlight to speak on her hackathon experience and present improvements made to the tool worked on, along with explaining outstanding bugs to get the dev prototype operational for public deployment. The ISA Tool is a very important tool for GLAM involvement with Wikimedia Commons, and allows for crowsourced ‘depicts’ statements and captions to be added to GLAM content contributed to the Commons. Wiki Mentor Africa is a programme designed to engage and promote technical contributions within African Wikimedia communities.