GLAM/Newsletter/June 2023/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue VI, June 2023

New Zealand report

Report on the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Conference 2023 and Auckland suburb updates

SPNHC2023

Ambrosia10 received a rapid grant to attend the annual conference of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections held in San Francisco and hosted by the California Academy of Sciences. The conference was held from May 28th until June 2nd. While at the conference she presented two papers. The first was titled "Names, dames and campaigns: a botanical case study in digitally narrowing the gaps". This presentation outlined how Wikidata was used by researchers into flowering plant genera named after women to collate and link their research. This presentation's slides and script can be found here. The second presentation was titled "Reuse in the Wiki world empowers engagement with Natural History Collections" and outlined examples of active engagement by natural history institutions with the Wikiverse and encouraged other natural history institutions to also actively with various Wiki projects. The slides and script can be found here.

Ambrosia10 has written a detailed conference report which can be found here. This report outlines her pre-conference social media posts and the resulting meeting of Ambrosia10 with the Head of Mineral, Meteorite and Rock collections, National Museums Scotland. It goes on to give her overall impressions of the conference, personal conference highlights, a summary of Wiki related conversations with attendees, post conference social media outreach undertaken and the resulting engagement and finally the anticipated follow up actions by Ambrosia10 as a result of her attendance at this conference.

The formal report back to the Wikimedia Foundation giving impact metrics and a financial report can be found here.

Auckland War Memorial Museum suburb project updates

We're half-way through the Auckland War Memorial Museum suburb project, and to mark this two new pages for major sub-regions were created: East Auckland and the Pōhutukawa Coast. One of the project's aims to make local history resources more accessible to teachers and students across Tāmaki Makaurau. With the creation of these two articles, now over 70% of students in the Auckland Region can now access an updated page on the general area where they live. As a part of this work, 17 suburb articles were also greatly expanded, including some of the highest priority areas like Howick, Bucklands Beach, Flat Bush and Pakuranga: areas which have high concentrations of schools.

The suburb project's editing focus is now on improving the two remaining sub-region articles, five regional centres outside of the city, and 19 remaining suburbs with significant student populations.

Critters and Wikinerds

Giantflightlessbirds published an article in Forest and Bird magazine about the seven-year collaboration between the Radio New Zealand show Critter of the Week and a group of Wikipedians, who ensure that there is a reasonable-quality Wikipedia article about each week's featured species. The Critter of the Week WikiProject now has an annual prize for volunteer editors, CC-licensed graphics in Commons, a mailing list, and a dozen volunteers, with regular training sessions and an annual in-person meetup planned.