Location: Virtual Meeting at this linkhttps://meet.jit.si/WikiAotearoa IMPORTANT: The first person joining the meeting needs to sign in as the "Moderator" using a Google, Facebook, or GitHub account; other attendees can then join without any authentication - see the jitsi blog for more information. NOTE: This video conferencing software link will ask permission to use your computer camera and microphone. You will need to agree to get full functionality. Google Chrome or Chromium is recommended for the best experience (not all aspects work correctly with other browsers). The Jitsi web-based video conferencing platform is 100% open source and fully encrypted. No account is needed and it's free.
Cost: Free
Meetup code of conduct and anonymity when meeting via video conference
This video conferencing meetup is a replacement for an in-person meetup. While attending and remaining anonymous is supported by the group, lurking is not supported and will be actively discouraged. All attendees are expected to use their User name as an identifier on the video conference call and to introduce themselves and their interest in joining the call on the chat channel of the call as a minimum. Participation using video and / or voice in addition to Chat is encouraged but not required.
Some members of the group have been the target of cyber bullying in the past and these measures are intended to support creating a safe space for collaboration.
If a new attendee joins the group with video and voice disabled, they will be encouraged to participate by the facilitator, using this script:
Welcome new attendee. This group respects your right to remain anonymous. This group has a policy of discouraging lurking as it makes some of us uncomfortable. If you are happy to introduce yourself over voice, please let us know what you've been working on and if you need help with any editing issues.
If you're not comfortable updating the group by voice, then that's okay. You have the option of introducing yourself and adding your user page link into the chat feature. The chat is deleted once the video conference finishes.
If you want to remain completely anonymous and not chat, then this meetup is not for you. We make comprehensive and extensive notes of the meetup that will be included in the meetup page afterwards. That's the best way to catch up with what this meetup has been doing if you don't want to contribute during the video call.
If you're not sure how to use the chat feature you can access it by clicking on the icon that looks like a speech bubble in the bottom left corner.
If, after an appropriate length of time, the new attendee does not participate by video, voice, or chat, the facilitator of the group will remove the attendee from the video call.
If the new attendee persists in logging in, the group will discuss abandoning the meet up.
The Jitsi video conferencing platform has a chat feature. This is used to share URLs and other commentary while the discussions are occurring. The facilitators may take a copy to help with writing up outcomes from the meeting on the meeting Wikipedia page. Any copies will be deleted once outcomes and notes are completed.
The WANZ Committee and our Executive Advisor are continuing to work on the WANZ website and this is close to launch. We've updated our long term strategy document. The 2023-2026 strategy is available to comment in this Google doc. Comments close on 31 December 2023. We've updated the WANZ meta page. We've set the date and location of the Annual National WikiConference which will be held in Auckland over the weekend of 23/24 of March 2024. We're still confirming the venue and we're likely to have travel scholarships available so keep your eye on updates.
We're delighted to announce that Dr Mike Dickison will serve as our Wikipedian at Large in the first half of 2024. The primary goal of this project is to foster collaboration between New Zealand organisations, its people, and Wikimedia platforms, advancing open knowledge in the process. Stationed in Christchurch, Mike will collaborate with a diverse array of individuals and institutions. A key focus of this project involves providing training and mentoring to individuals interested in exploring Wikipedia editing. Our overarching objective is to achieve more diverse participation on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms. A reminder that WANZ is still open for membership - it costs only $NZ5 a year. Look to our Meta page to find out more. If you're interested in setting up an edit-a-thon or activity WANZ has funding available to support you and the application process is really easy. Contact Dianne at info[at]wikimedia.nz and she can help you through the process.
A quick reminder that the scholarships for Wikimania 2024 in Poland are open until 18 December. They have full ride scholarships available that include travel, accommodation, and food. If you're an editor then you're eligable to apply.
A number of the committee and WANZ community have taken up the offer by Wikimedia Foundation to have a talking session with WMF senior leadership. This is available to all community members. Check out the programme here.
We are almost half way through the financial year and the holidays are a great time to add your contributions to the Community Activity Annual Report that will accompany our annual reporting at the end of June. The draft report is here.
We have posted notices in various channels letting the community know that we have funding available to support people in managing events etc. Administration of finances is slowly improving, and we have just implemented Stripe as an online payment system. This will be integrated with our accounting system Xero to enable payment of subscriptions via credit/debit card. We will also integrate Stripe into the website as a portal for donations. Marshelec (talk)
Wiki-Con Weekends, Editathons, Events and Outreach in 2023
If you're an event organiser, don't forget to add your event as a program to the Campaign Dashboard. The Dashboard is a key tracking tool for reporting back to Wikimedia Foundation and will help us ensure that we get funding in future years. If you are unsure how to add programs to the Campaign dashboard you can find further information here on how to create a new event dashboard and how to link it to the overall campaign dashboard. Alternatively contact: Ambrosia10 (talk) on her talk page for help.
New Zealand Wikidata Thesis Project aims to get New Zealand dissertations into Wikidata. Project Page, Project Dashboard. Status: 17% of the 66k theses currently have a matched author (rather than an author name string) and in total we have disambiguated approx 17k people. We just tipped over 5k people matched in the Mixnmatch dataset (thank you as ever Annie!).
Plans: My plans for the project include first matching all the advisors (I have around 5.5k left, down significantly from 11k a month ago). Once that's done, I will make huge efforts to find all remaining authors who wrote more than one thesis. I will likely re-reconcile against Wikidata to find authors that have popped up in the last couple of years, and re-reconcile against Orcid to create new people items for authors who are in Orcid but not yet in Wikidata. After that I may wrap up the project by creating new items for all remaining authors (or just leave the Mixnmatch as is, depending on whether I have the time to continue to download matches from Mnm). I anticipate finishing this coming year. In amongst all that Deborah and I still need to get our paper published, and do some work with the librarians on an ongoing upload, which is my priority for the first half of the year. DrThneed (talk)
Mohua / Golden Bay Meetup - the event will be attended by the WANZ committee members as they are having a business planning day on the Friday prior ready for July 2024–June 2025. They will also be on hand to support the meetup. Travel support is available from WANZ if you are interested in attending. Email admin @ wikimedia.nz
Other suggestions for themes around events include Library Week, Conservation Week, International Volunteers Day, 24hr editathon for Ada Lovelace Day, WikiSource Women's History Month for Wikisource, Winter Olympics, Matariki Event, Library Week. We should think about the focus of the work – is it to onboard folk or to focus on content. Any further update?
Opportunity to say what you’re working on and if you need help to do anything or want anything demonstrated. You can add requests for help here prior to the meeting if you want
Alexeyevitch has obtained rollback user rights; this tool will be useful to his counter-vandalism work on Wikipedia. He's also been given the Pending Changes Reviewer tool. He's been undertaking this work and has been getting doxxed as well as receiving unpleasant messages. This led to a discussion in support of his work and also how to keep mentally well and get the support needed.
The DYK multihook for new MPS is still waiting for 13 more reviews although progress has been made. It now has a lovely 20-person image!
Wikidata: added new professors and associate professors as per press releases from AUT, Canterbury and Massey. The list of women professors needing pages is now 142 women long and getting longer, despite my efforts above! If anyone wants to chip in, I especially appreciate help with Otago staff. I also added to Wikidata lists of fellows for a couple of societies, and the new Royal Society awards as they were announced.
Commons: Have downloaded around 150 photos from the Royal Society award events, and have them teed up in OpenRefine with their depicts statements and captions etc just waiting to be uploaded, the RS just hasn't yet put a license statement on the Google albums. I will be walking through how I've done this as a demo with the OpenRefine Train the Trainers group on Friday so will get feedback if there are any improvements I can make. I'm also working with a batch of over 100 images of Otago professors from the Hocken, which I'm going to share as a training/scraping dataset with other people on the TTT course.
Attendee photo, MontevideoGiantflightlessbirds: Attended the GLAM Wiki conference in Uruguay, 16–18 November, the only Australasian present. The sessions were interesting, but the discussions and meetings during and afterwards were (as always) the most productive. The conference was very multilingual, with booths of live translators sending English (and other languages) over headsets—frequently sessions were in Spanish. I gave a Wikisource introduction and ran a practical Wikisource workshop. Highlights were the Flickypedia tool developed by Flickr for Commons uploads, conversations with Selena Deckelmann and Alex Stinson from the Wikimedia Foundation, meeting the natural history staff of the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Montevideo and the Museo La Plata (as well as local Wikimedians) in La Plata, Argentina. I stayed on for a couple of weeks so could meet with organisations in Montevideo and La Plata, and stayed with Evelin and Alex on the farm in Uruguay for a few days. Downsides were the packed, multiple-stream format with little unstructured time, and having to share a tiny hotel room! The Foundation is very keen on people using the Event Registration tool, and (good news) in supporting some new analytics tools for campaigns, rather than being hands-off as they've been in the past. I'll link to my notes here when I've finished transcribing them.
I've also been wrapping up the Healthier Lives project and the West Coast Wikipedian at Large (postponed visit to Karamea finally happening in early January), and am preparing the New Zealand Wikipedian at Large project and calendar—starting with a field trip to Cass on January 13th.
Attended and gave a key note at the Australian Citizen Science Conference 2023 at the Sunshine Coast See https://zenodo.org/records/10198576
A funding application to Wikidata asking for funds to attend, run a Wikidata workshop at and wikify the international Botanical congress.
Gave a presentation to a university undergraduate class at Tennessee Tech University about Wikidata and Bionomia.
Had meetings with Mike Dickison and also Lucy Schrader at Te papa as I’m considering applying for funding for a three month research expeditions Wikimedian in residence position.
Presented on the research expedition schema at the Wikidata modelling days 2023 biodiversity modelling challenge session
Continuing to work on the Hidden Figures undergraduate course materials. Two modules have now been finalised and submitted and good progress is being made on the Bionomia and Wikidata modules. Hoping to finalise these in the New Year.
Had a meeting with Victoria, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight and Yael Weissburg Vice President, Community Growth, Wikimedia Foundation to discuss general issues around the Wikimedia movement.
Managed to spend a day or two improving NZ endemic moth articles including this example
Have been contacted by Anton Savchenko who is working on creating a digital version of TL-2 a bibliographical publication on authors and publications important to botany. He’s given me a dataset of people he can’t find Wikidata items for. I made a pigs ear of OpenRefine and am now currently correcting my errors and duplicates. Literally learning by making mistakes!
Gertrude206 slowly making progress on Tongariro Power Scheme article. Thanks to Marshelec for his contributions. Will spin off to other articles such as rivers. Rivers in Wikidata needing to be cleaned up too.
Paora - usual work of wiki editing. Lots of stuff in wash up from general election. Succession boxes etc needed updating. Picking up new NZ articles. Wiki gardening. Obituaries and seeing who has died and up-dating articles as a result. For example https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q107333588
Vandemonian - been working on two articles in his sandbox. One is a GLAM institute with multiple names. So much to pull together. He’s been working with Annie about how they might deal with this and integrated into this into an existing article. Also preparing an article on an arachnologist. He’s learning how Wikidata might interact with information and the species this person has described. Also how openrefine might be used to help with that work.
Einebillion - Other than president stuff she's been meeting the board members discussing the Wikimedia movements. Also been doing Te Papa mix’n’match, and working on soldiers in the NZ land wars. Adding them to Wikidata and connecting them.
BUGZ: The BUGZ database is now available again on The Entomological Society of New Zealand's website. (The previous database/website was decommissioned and an archive of the content was made available on the Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research Data Repository). I have updated references I could find on Wikidata and Wikipedia, but Wikispecies will be more of a challenge! Does anyone have any suggestions? (David Nind)
Spreadsheet with list of articles (note: number of rows doesn't match information on BUGZ about page - 16,080 on about page vs 11,355 in spreadsheet)
Wwwyzzerdd for Wikidata - this is a chrome and firefox extension that allows you to add statements while you are reading Wikidata. Quite cool and a video can be seen here.
Giantflightlessbirds gave a brief shout out from the GLAMWiki conference - said Ambrosia10 was frequently mentioned and also that there were archaeologists in Argentina that he met wanting to upload papers on a research programme into Wikidata. They are trying to model it on the NZ thesis project which was gratifying!
4 February 2024, same time, same place (assuming we're having a break in January —note the numbering and sessions in the meetups template need to be adjusted)
