GLAM/Newsletter/April 2024/Contents/New Zealand report

New Zealand report

Te Papa research expeditions and the Wikipedian at Large

This 12 week long project continues to progress. Recently Ambrosia10 has been consulting with Avocadobabygirl as well as other Te Papa staff about how Te Papa might take advantage of the work being done in Wikidata on Te Papa related research expeditions. These discussions have focused on how research expedition Wikidata QIDs might be added to Te Papa's collection management system. Te Papa is keen to roundtrip Wikidata QIDs and currently uses Wikidata QIDs for people in their collection management system. See this blog post about this work. Te Papa is working out how to extend this type of identifier round tripping to research expeditions.

Discussions have also explored the potential for the records for specimens, held by Te Papa and collected during those research expeditions, to be linked to the expedition records in Te Papa's collection management system. As a result of the locations, dates and participants being added to the research expedition Wikidata items, it is now possible to search through Te Papa's specimen collection and to extract those specimens collected during expeditions, even when this is not explicitly stated on the specimen record. Te Papa looking into the feasibility of explicitly linking collection records to research expeditions in its collection management system.

Ambrosia10 has submitted an abstract to the upcoming joint SPNHC/TDWG 2024 conference to present on the Te Papa research expeditions project. If accepted Ambrosia10 hopes this presentation will raise awareness in the natural history community of this type of work and to encourage and give guidance to those institutions and their staff who wish to replicate this project in their institutions.

In other news, three events relating to Te Papa research expeditions are being planned. Two involve staff at Te Papa and one is aimed at the general public with an emphasis of encouraging university students to attend and learn how to edit Wikipedia. These events include a #1Lib1Ref event on the 29th of May aimed at Te Papa staff including their library and archives staff. Resources relating to research expeditions will be provided and participants will be encouraged to add references to Wikipedia articles relating to research expeditions. The second event being planned is an Editathon with Te Papa staff. This is likely to take place in the week beginning on the 3rd of June. Participants will be encouraged to edit English Wikipedia articles relating to research expeditions involving Te Papa, its predecessors, its staff or its collections. Finally a public facing editathon is also being planned for the 13th of July.

Last but definitely not least Avocadobabygirl has created an infobox expedition template which draws information from Wikidata to display in the infobox of a Wikipedia article, based on Infobox person/Wikidata. This Wikidata generated infobox only displays data from Wikidata if the information is referenced on Wikidata from a source other than Wikipedia. Editors are still able to override or prevent specific fields from displaying and the template does not display unsourced values. To see this template in action see the Te Papa related research expedition Three Kings Islands Expedition 1970. This infobox template is still under development and if you wish to reach out to discuss improvements please see the template talk page.

The Wikipedian at Large project continued in Christchurch, with regular monthly meetups, an edit-a-thon scheduled for May, and the first planning meeting for the New Zealand national WikiCon (to be held in Christchurch in 2025).

The Wikipedian is now based in Tūranga, the Christchurch Central Library. To coincide with UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day on April 23rd, a Wikisource project was started to transcribe books on Christchurch and Canterbury, drawing from amongst other sources the Library's own scanned archive, Canterbury Stories.

After giving a presentation to the local branch of the Entomological Society, the Wikipedian was approached by emeritus entomologist Peter Johns, over 90 but still regularly working on the Canterbury Museum entomology collections. His 1966 paper (Q125308748) on the native cockroaches of New Zealand is currently the last word on the subject. Johns was keen to work with a Wikipedian to improve the coverage of the cockroach genus Celatoblatta, which soon after featured in the radio show Critter of the Week, leading to the first article about a Celatoblatta species in English. We'll be collaborating on the Cockroaches in Red project over the next two months. Other related entomology projects have been improving the reuse and visibiity of Des Helmore's insect illustrations, and participating in the City Nature Challenge bioblitz by convincing iNaturalist users to switch to an open photo licence.