Wikipedia:GLAM/New Zealand Wikipedian at Large/December 2018 Report



On the invitation of the Department of Conservation, I spent a weekend in Invercargill working with the kākāpō/takahē Recovery Team. As well as a day spent collaboratively commenting on and editing the Wikipedia pages for each species, I worked with the team leader and database manager on a Wikidata Kākāpō project, which would put the entire species – all 147 named living birds, plus some deceased – into Wikidata. The data was approved and released, and we're now creating a "DOC ID" property to allow upload.

I spent two weeks as Wikipedian in Residence at Wellington City Archives, educating staff on Commons and Wikipedia strategies, and planning editing events. The focus while I was there was the list of Mayors of Wellington, identifying gaps in coverage and scanning photos to fill them. We established that the Wellington City Council's photo archive by their current staff photographer was all fair game to be released under a Creative Commons license, which would be a potentially huge corpus of work.

= Meetings =
 * NZ Micrographics to discuss collaboration with Recollect
 * Interviewed artist Des Helmore for New Zealand Geographic article on his recently uploaded illustrations; took infobox photos and acquired a set of cartoons to upload to Commons

= Presentations =
 * 3 Dec: Editing Wikipedia • Department of Conservation kākāpō/takahē team, Invercargill

= Workshops =
 * 12 Dec: NZ Women in Design Wikiblitz • Massey University College of Creative Arts, Wellington • Meetup/Wellington/Women in Design

= Meetups =
 * 18 Dec: "Wiki in the Pub" • Husk, Ghuznee St, Wellington

= Media coverage =
 * Ryan, Kathryn. (20 Dec 2018). "NZ's Wikipedian: is he winning the battle for content?" (audio). RNZ Nine to Noon. (Radio interview.)
 * Moe, Steven. (3 Dec 2018). "Dr Mike Dickison on being 'Wikipedian-at-Large' and giant flightless birds." Seeds. (podcast.)
 * Dragonfly Data Science. (10 Dec 2018) "Open data for a global audience."