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New Zealand report

ASBS 2025 Conference follow-up Wiki webinar & Auckland Museum student update

By Ambrosia10, Stitchbird2 & Winnieswikiworld

Follow-up outreach at the ASBS 2025 Conference

Heidi and Siobhan with their personalised ASBS conference mugs

Recent outreach undertaken by Ambrosia10 and Stitchbird2 at the Australasian Systemic Botany Society 2025 Conference as part of the Wikidata WikiProject ASBS 2025 was detailed in last month's newsletter, including the main aims and other events in our suite of outreach activities for this project.

Our final event as part of this package was to to hold a follow-up webinar on the 9th of December. The first half of the webinar covered additional topics that were brought up at the previous webinar and in-person workshop, attracting 23 sign-ups, with 9 joining in on the live presentation.

We covered more advanced topics and questions that came up during our previous webinar and in-person workshop:

  • In Wikipedia, how to create a new article, how to use and edit templates, infoboxes and the talk page, and tips on correcting bias,
  • In Wikimedia Commons, how to upload specimen images from GBIF and correct species names in image files, and
  • In Wikidata, how to streamline your editing with several practical tools, and how to add qualifiers and references to statements.

The slides and script area available in Zenodo and Commons (slides) and script. The recording of this part of the webinar was recorded and is available on Commons. This recording and slides were also emailed to all those who signed up for or participated in the previous onboarding webinar or in-person workshop.

The second half of the follow up webinar was a non-recorded discussion and Q&A session that also served as a check-in with editors, some of whom had commenced contributing to the Wikiverse during our WikiProject.

Update on the Bioeconomy Science Institute Wikimedian in Residence

Handwriting sample of botanist Leonard Cockayne

Ambrosia10 recently completed a site visit to the Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research (MWLR) group in Lincoln meeting the collection manager and curators at the Allan Herbarium. As a result of this meeting Ambrosia10 prioritised the uploading of handwriting samples of notable New Zealand and international botanists collated from specimens and archives held by the herbarium. See the Allan Herbarium handwriting sample category in Wikimedia Commons. Having such an accessible and reusable collection of handwriting samples can help herbarium both in New Zealand and internationally to accurately identify specimens collected and curated by those botanists. This upload has led to discussions with both Auckland Museum and Te Papa staff about further uploads of handwriting samples held by herbaria in those institutions.

After the Lincoln site visit librarians supplied Ambrosia10 with a list of publications authored by scientists affiliated with the Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research Group. After selecting articles published in scientific journals, cleaning the metadata relating to those publications, and reconciling the articles against Wikidata to reduce the risk of duplication, Ambrosia10 used OpenRefine to create over 4000 Wikidata items for those publications. Work continues to disambiguate article authors and add further identifiers to the Wikidata items for those articles.

Auckland Museum student update

The Auckland Museum summer student programme for 2025-2026 is well under way. The cohort of six are being supervised by Winnieswikiworld alongside supervisors from MOTAT, NZMM and The Fletcher's Trust Archives. The students have been busy creating and enriching Auckland local history content, filling knowledge gaps and utilising their institutions research and collections. Some new articles created include:

Some new Wikimedia Commons uploads include:

GLAM project pages have been created and updated:

The Auckland Museum students have started a Wikiquote project with our librarian to support the #Shesaid campaign. So far, they have created pages with quotes from important women in Aotearoa:


As part of the programme, the students have been joined by a number of guest speaker Wikimedians Wing Chan, Lucy Moore and Alice Woods where they have gained valuable insight into the variety of work being done across Wikimedia platforms. They have also had tours of Auckland Museums Documentary Heritage and Collection Care departments, a session about Teu Le Va, the Museum's Pacific dimension and a tour of MOTATs offsite storage.

The students are in the midst of organising an Edit-a-thon which will be held at the Auckland Museum Research Library on Saturday 31st of January. The event will focus on working women of New Zealand, supporting the Women in Red Wikiproject. The goal will be to edit stub or start-class articles about New Zealand women who have worked or still work in three key areas- Arts, STEM and Law & Politics.

For updates about the student's progress, follow the project page.


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