GLAM/Newsletter/February 2026/Contents/New Zealand report
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Farewelling the Auckland Museum Summer Students and an update on the NZBSI WiR
Auckland Museum
The third and final month of the Auckland Museum Wikipedia summer studentship has come to an end. Over the past 10 weeks 6 students have contributed to the world of Wikimedia through the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Local Histories project. They have connected with Auckland Museum staff and guest speaker Wikimedians from Aotearoa and across the globe and learnt how others participate in the movement.
The students have written blogposts for Diff (or their GLAMs blogspace) which can be read here:
- Contemplating the Contemporary: Artist Biographies in the Wiki Space as Time Passes by Avawatson03
- Reducing AI Bias by Reducing Wiki Bias by CuriousityKat33
- Judgement and Chance: Reflections on my Wikipedia Summer Studentship 25/26 by SydneyBridgeUpsideDown
- Interconnecting Local Histories through GLAM and Wikipedia by Roobee11
- Into the Spotlight: Sharing Archives through Wikimedia Commons by LadyRabbit
- NZMM blogpost by Goose276
Overall the students created 37 brand new articles, edited 160 articles, made 1.21K total edits, added 114K words and 1.81K references. They also uploaded 145 files to Wikimedia Commons, of their own images and of their GLAMs open collections.
On February 10th, the students presented their projects at a symposium held in the Auckland Museum auditorium.
Avawatson03 presented, Enhancing Aotearoa's Artistic Presence on Wiki. She spoke about utilising Auckland Museum resources, focusing on underrepresented communities, Women in Red and her work with the Wikiquote #SheSaid campaign.
CuriosityKat33 presented, Wikipedia for GLAMs in the Generative AI Era. She spoke about the dangers of AI, Wikipedia as the antithesis to generative AI, addressing gendered and geographical representation gaps and how GLAMs can use Wikipedia to correctly represent local histories on the internet.
SydneyBridgeUpsideDown and Goose276 presented, Digisting the Working Fleet through Wikipedia. They spoke about their research with the Bill Laxon Library and NZMM Online Collection. Showing how their project established the NZMM a presence on Wiki through articles and Wikimedia Commons uploads.
LadyRabbit presented, Out of the Archives: Wikipedia and open access. She spoke about how her project aimed to broaden the usage of content from the Fletcher Trust Archives and support greater digital visibility for the collection. This included researching a wide range of topics such as the Winstone family and 20th century social welfare.
Roobee11 presented, Finding Connections in unusual places. She spoke about utilising Vernon, institutional archives and the Walsh Memorial Library resources to set up MOTAT's Wikimedia Commons presence- along the way discovering unique connections in her research.
Watch the Summer Student Symposium 2026 here.
Thank you to our partners at the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT), the Fletchers Trust Archives and New Zealand Maritime Museum (NZMM).
A special thank you to The Sheldon Werner Charitable Fund, Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund, Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand and The Fletchers Trust.
Much of February was spent working on, as well as preparing documentation for, the data models for both type specimen Wikidata items and the structured data for Wikimedia Commons specimen image files. See this WikiProject collaboration with Auckland Museum for further information on this effort. Ambrosia10 has also been drafting "how to" documentation for NZBSI staff as well as the wider Wiki editing community on how to create type specimen Wikidata items via OpenRefine and how to upload openly licensed specimen images into Wikimedia Commons with appropriate structured data. This documentation will be published in Zenodo and added to Wikimedia Commons in the near future.
In person planning meetings were held with Leanne Elder and Nick Kirk (both from NZBSI) for a survey of staff to gage their knowledge of Wiki platforms. The aim of this survey is to assist with the planning of two in person Wiki workshops to be held at both the Lincoln and Auckland sites in the latter half of May.
Ambrosia10 was able to take advantage of this in person meeting to commence training Leanne Elder, a senior technician in imaging & digitisation at the NZBSI, in Wikimedia Commons uploads. It is anticipated that this will become part of her imaging workflow when dealing with type specimens held in NZBSI collections or loaned to NZBSI staff.
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