Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand/National parks

This is the project page for a dedicated effort to improve articles on the national parks of New Zealand. The goal of this collaboration is to significantly improve the quality of articles on our national parks, ideally to the point that they could be nominated for Good or Featured Article status.

Current focus
Content improvements and expansion
 * Abel Tasman National Park
 * Arthurs Pass National Park

Copy edits and polish
 * Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park
 * Kahurangi National Park

Background
The state of articles on our national parks has been a semi-frequent topic of conversation in past collaborations, brought on by the perception that this doesn't reflect the natural or cultural significance of the parks for New Zealand. Following a discussion during the 2022 West Coast Wikipedian at Large project, an initial plan was proposed on the WikiProject New Zealand noticeboard. This unfortunately fell by the wayside, and didn't progress until recently. This effort will build off this work and help progress improvements to the national parks.

Scope
At present, the scope is currently limited to the primary articles on the 14 current and former national parks of New Zealand, and the article for the current protected area of Te Urewera which replaced the national park. If the collaboration goes well and there is interest in it continuing, we may expand the scope to cover other significant areas along similar lines, such as our world heritage sites, national reserves, or great walks. Features within the parks are also out of scope at present, as many of these are in a better state than the article of the park itself.

Standard format
The below is a rough format which the articles should follow, to ensure a degree of consistency between them. This may need to be revised as necessary where there are particular areas of a park that deserve more prominence for example, the article for Tongariro National Park would naturally have more discussion of volcanoes and geology than most other parks, while Fiordland National Park may wish to highlight the prehistoric glaciation which formed the fiords or Westland Tai Poutini the gold rush. As such, while the level two headings should stay consistent, treat the level three headings as more of a guideline.

Progress and communications
A brief report on the project was given at the Auckland Wikicon 2024 on 24 March 2024. Here are the slides.

Wikidata progress
Wikidata clean-up of national parks, focusing on improving these features:
 * One Wikidata item per feature (i.e. one Wikidata item for a stream instead of four)
 * Features are in their correct positions
 * Hills and saddles have height above sea-level information
 * Rivers with Wikipedia pages are linked to OpenStreetMap, and have improved Wikipedia infoboxes
 * Wiki Commons images are categorised in ways that match Wikidata items
 * All features use the field 'located in protected area'
 * A navigation template is created on English Wikipedia, including all identified features from Wikidata with pages

Completed

 * Abel Tasman National Park
 * Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park
 * Egmont National Park
 * Fiordland National Park
 * Kahurangi National Park
 * Mount Aspiring National Park
 * Nelson Lakes National Park
 * Paparoa National Park
 * Rakiura National Park
 * Regional parks of New Zealand
 * Tongariro National Park
 * Westland Tai Poutini National Park
 * Whanganui National Park

To be completed

 * Te Urewera

Participants
To join, add your name to the below list using three tildes, like so:
 * Turnagra (talk)
 *  Schwede 66 
 * Marshelec (talk)
 * Uninspired Username
 * AtticEdit (talk)
 * Wainuiomartian (talk)
 * Ambrosia10 (talk)
 * Prosperosity (talk) (will improve the Wikidata items of the parks)
 * Chocmilk03 (talk)
 * Pakoire (talk)
 * Stitchbird2 (talk)
 * Jon (talk)
 * Alexeyevitch (talk)
 * Canley (talk) (can do mapping, OpenStreetMap, and Wikidata work)
 * Add yourself here!