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Australia report

Celebrating Wikidata, and over 400 new Wikipedia pages

By Jimmyjrg
Explaining Wikidata in Western Australia

This past month Wikimedia Australia has run events in three cities and online around Wikidata and improving STEM content on Wikipedia. We also experimented with drop in sessions online which averaged two people per session. A lot of time has been dedicated to the upcoming ESEAP Conference and we look forward to meeting and exchanging stories with everyone there soon.

Wikidata's 10th birthday celebrations

Cutting the cake for Wikidata 10th birthday

Around the world Wikimedians celebrated the 10th birthday of Wikidata, and in Western Australia the regular Perth meetup held their own event with a Wikidata birthday cake.

Wikipedians in Perth have been meeting since 2007 in what are more often social events, but this month hosted User:MargaretRDonald who gave a talk on adding Australia biota to Wikidata based on her recent fellowship. She then cut a birthday cake, which was enjoyed by everyone, and other Wikipedians from around Australia also joined in via Zoom. Also present was Maia Williams, who worked on her own Wikidata fellowship project with Australian census data.

Margaret's recent work has included disambiguating author names for Australian species and taxa, and she is working towards the goal of there being a Wikipedia page for every Australian species.

To help her accomplish this goal Wikimedia Australia has been contacting museums about releasing their images under an open license and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. This in turn will motivate people, like Margaret, to create Wikipedia articles about the species.

Leptomithrax gaimardii

As a recent example, this photo of Giant spider crab Leptomithrax gaimardii was made available by Museums Victoria and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. It was then added to the relevant Wikidata page, and Margaret created a page on English Wikipedia.

The crab was then added to the English Wikipedia category Taxa named by Henri Milne-Edwards. Once every taxa has its own Wikipedia page, categories like these will be even more useful as some authors named thousands and thousands of taxa in their careers.

427 articles and counting

Annie Reynolds has been contributing to English Wikipedia for many years, and has actively supported every editathon event I've attended. She helps set up dashboards, offers guidance to new editors, and is full of useful tips she's picked up along the way.

At a recent editathon in Sydney, focusing on Women in STEM, SBS News interviewed Annie about her contributions.

In their article it was revealed she has spent over 1000 hours writing about women for Wikipedia, and has already contributed 427 new articles.

When the article was published, Annie was flooded with praise across Twitter from people inspired by her work, and the work of others around the world like Jess Wade.

Seeing the work of Annie Reynolds and the many other contributors actively adding to Wikipedia is helping people understand how anyone can contribute to Wikipedia and other Wiki projects.

Annie has spent five years adding biographical articles about women to English Wikipedia and is a member of the Women's Write Wiki group who meet regularly at Sydney's Women's Library.

In the SBS article, Annie describes her work as a "minor achievement" compared to people like Jess Wade (who has added some 1,700 Wikipedia articles), but Annie's experience allows her to act as a mentor for those starting out today, and she will continue to inspire us as she sets her sights on article number 428.


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