GLAM/Newsletter/January 2026/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue I, January 2026

New Zealand report

Auckland Museum Student Edit-a-thon, the NZBSI Wikimedian in Residence project, and other residencies

Auckland Museum: Youth engagement & Museum tours

The Auckland Museum summer student cohort has been busy contributing to the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Local Histories Project, creating and enriching Wiki content relating to their respective GLAM placements at Auckland Museum, MOTAT, NZ Maritime Museum and The Fletchers Trust Archives.

The students brainstormed ways to encourage youth engagement with Wikimedia platforms and created posters.

Poster by Avawatson03, CuriosityKat33 & LadyRabbit
Poster by Roobee11, SydneyBridgeUpsideDown & Goose276

As part of the wider Studentship programme, the students have visited the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT) and the New Zealand Maritime Museum. At MOTAT the students visited the Aviation Hall, Walsh Memorial Library, the original Pumping Station, Te Puawānanga Science and Technology Centre and even rode in one of the iconic trams! The students were guided around the multiple sites by Alba Letts (Director of Collections), Belinda Nevin (Head of Curatorial Research) and Simon Witherill (Head of Walsh Memorial Library) and gained valuable insight into how MOTAT functions and their aspirations for the future.

They also toured the New Zealand Maritime Museum, seeing the exhibtiions spaces and back of house.They were welcomed by Elle Keen (Registrar) and Andrew Hales (Lead Photographer) and were lucky enough to sail the Auckland Harbour onboard the Ted Ashby.

Student Edit-a-thon

The cohort of students hosted an Edit-a-thon on the 31st January at the Auckland Museum research library. The event, "We Did Do It"- Celebrating the Contributions of Working Wāhine in Aotearoa focused on editing articles of New Zealand women who have worked or still work in three key areas- Arts, STEM and Law & Politics. There were 30 participants, both new and experienced editors, who edited over 50 articles and added 120 references to Wikipedia articles about New Zealand women!

Auckland Museum Summer Students at MOTAT Aviation Hall Jan 2026
Auckland Museum Summer Students boarding the Ted Ashby Jan 2026
Students presenting at Edit-a-thon

Update on the Bioeconomy Science Institute WiR

As part of the New Zealand Bioeconomy Science Institute (NZBSI) Wikimedia in Residence Ambrosia10 has recently documented and published two workflows aiming to support both the employees of the NZBSI as well as Wiki editors to share biodiversity data sourced from natural history collections and databases overseen by NZBSI.

The first workflow gives guidance on how to add Biota of New Zealand database identifiers on to appropriate Wikidata items via OpenRefine.

The second workflow gives guidance on how to extract collector data from Bionomia.net frictionless datasets and again use OpenRefine to add collection items at statements to natural history collector Wikidata items.

As part of the WiR Ambrosia10 and Dactylantha from the Auckland Museum have been collaborating on a Wikidata WikiProject creating a data model for holotype specimen Wikidata items as well as a data model for structured data statements made on natural history specimen images on Wikimedia Commons. The intent of this project is to support the creation of holotype specimen Wikidata items and the upload of holotype specimen images from both NZBSI collections as well as Auckland Museum collections.

Adding Biota of NZ database ids to Wikidata
Adding "Collection items at" statements

Some Wikimedia residencies in Aotearoa

Giantflightlessbirds is currently working as a Wikipedian in Residence with three different organisations.

As coordinator of the Kaikōra Wikiproject, funded jointly by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand and the Kaikōura District Council, a small team of editors are working on articles about the history, biodiversity, geography, and people of this small seaside town, known mostly for its whale-watching tourism. This will culminate in a Wiki Weekend on 7–8 March where Wikipedians from around the country will visit to work on articles together and document the town for Commons.

The project started after a visit to the Kaikōura Museum as a tourist in October 2024; Giantflightlessbirds arranged with the museum manager to return in July 2025 to give a public talk on Wikipedia and run a workshop explaining Wikipedia and Commons to local heritage and tourism operators. The District Council have agreed to make available a sizeable library of professional tourism photography under an open licence, and the museum will be arranging the upload of a large collection of out-of-copyright historical photos, as well as helping clear the copyright of some local-history books for Wikisource.

MacDiarmid Institute staff and researchers at the Auckland symposium photo shoot
Pauline Harris
Geoff Wilmott
Jackson Miller
Erin Leitao
Shanghai Wei
Vanessa Young
Volker Nock

An ongoing project with the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology has been focussed on creating good Wikidata profiles and open-licensed photos of the main researchers. Giantflightlessbirds attended the MacDiarmid Institute Annual Symposium in Auckland in November 2025 and gave two talks on Wikipedia, one to the entire Institute and one to early-career researchers. He then organised a photo-shoot of PhD students, while the event photographer shot dozens of portraits of researchers, and both image collections were uploaded to Commons. The Institute is supplying numerous other photos from its image library under an open licence. The next stage of the project will be inviting selected researchers to give feedback on Wikipedia articles on their field of study, pointing out gaps on the Talk page and supplying up-to-date references. The ultimate goal of this collaboration is to demonstrate to research organisations how they increase the public impact of their research and work with Wikimedia platforms by using appropriate licensing and partnering with the editing community.

The Aotearoa Archaeology project started at the end of January, funded by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand and hosted for a day a week at Underground Overground Archaeology in Christchurch. The coverage of New Zealand archaeology in Wikipedia and Commons is extremely poor; much of the project will be an education campaign for the archaeology community, ending with a presentation or workshop at the national Archaeology Association conference in June. There is a large "grey literature" of archaeology reports that are difficult to find and cite, numerous photo collections under All Rights Reserved copyright, and almost no citation of the key works of New Zealand archaeology in Wikipedia. Giantflightlessbirds will be improving a series of articles on the leading lights of Aotearoa archaeology as a demonstration, but will also be working with a selection of early-career researchers to show them the importance on ORCID, Wikidata, open-access publication, and making photographic documentation of excavations available in Commons. He'll also be showing how photos of artifacts like pottery or tin cans can be put in front of the wider audience that read Wikipedia but not archaeological journals.

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