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Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

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Summary

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  • From July 2018 through June 2019 I was the first Wikipedian at Large, helping New Zealand institutions engage with Wikipedia and open knowledge.
  • I was a visitor or Wikipedian in Residence (for up to 6 weeks) in 20 organisations ranging from museums to nature reserves, from Auckland to Dunedin, training staff and helping them use their expertise to improve Wikipedia and make images, text, and video freely usable by the public.
  • I ran 55 events for the volunteer community and the public: edit-a-thons, meetups, Wikidrinks, Wikibrunches, and Wikiblitzes.
  • I gave 31 presentations to community groups, international conferences, and everything in between, and was on the radio and in the press as a public face for the Wikimedia Movement.
  • This project recruited many new editors, began regular meetups in Wellington and irregular meetups in three other cities, and led to the formation of the first New Zealand Wikimedia User Group.

Project Goals

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  1. Immediate and well-publicised improvements in New Zealand's coverage in Wikimedia projects, by helping heritage and research organisations host public Wikipedia events and release appropriate image collections to Commons.
  2. The creation of an editor support network in New Zealand’s four main cities (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin) through a Facebook group and offline meetups, with the long-term goal of building a self-sustaining editing community.
  3. Continued long-term participation of New Zealand organisations in Wikimedia projects by helping them develop a Wikimedia engagement strategy, and by training and supporting the key staff who will drive continued Wikipedia activity.

Project Impact

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Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets

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  1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
  2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
  3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.
Planned measure of success
(include numeric target, if applicable) 		Actual result Explanation
Two editor meetups in each of the four main centres, with at least eight Wikipedians attending on average. 3 to 14 events in the four main centres, average attendance 7.2 see below
Over 75% of participants satisfied or very satisfied, with over 50% interested in meetups or further events 90% satisfaction, 80% interested in attending again Collected from evaluation forms handed out at each event
total participants: 300 228 see below
new editors: 250 128 see below


The initial goals for attendance and new editors were based on

  • NZ Species (2016) at the National Museum Te Papa in Wellington, which had 15 attendees and 7 remote attendees (almost all new editors)
  • Women in Science (2017), hosted in Wellington by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, had 33 attending (2 remotely)
  • NZ Insect Cards in Auckland (20 new editors, 2 experienced admins)

In retrospect, these turned out to be three of the largest edit-a-thons ever held in New Zealand, which made the initial goals a little unrealistic! However, although attendance for each event was lower than predicted, I ran four times as many events as planned (32 rather than 8).

Story

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This project was a gamble: New Zealand had never received WMF project funding before, our Movement volunteers were dispersed and had not had a meetup in years, and only one NZ institution had ever tried engaging with Wikipedia. I hoped that a series of edit-a-thons would at least recruit more volunteers to write New Zealand content, and that the organisations I was based with would come up with WIkimedia strategies.

We did indeed recruit new editors, mostly female. I discovered how low retention rates were without a comunity infrastrtucture of meetups to support beginner, but some of those new recruits have since organised a monthly Wellington meetup. Many institutions started taking Wikipedia and Commons seriously, and made selections of photos available as sample uploads – sometimes, as with Nelson Museum, they realised they weren't able to use Creative Commons licences on their public-domain images. But the most memorable achievements were unexpected and emerged as the nature of the one-year project changed. For example, when I began I was most concerned with recruiting new editors to create Wikipedia content, and organising photo uploads from institutions. But by the end, about a third of my efforts were in persuading GLAM institutions to take Wikidata seriously – and Wikidata was something I was fairly unfamiliar with at the start of the project.

  • Some of the Des Helmore illustrations now in Commons
  • Clitarchus hookeri eggs
    Clitarchus hookeri eggs
  • NZ praying mantis
    NZ praying mantis
  • NZ blue blowfly
    NZ blue blowfly
  • Cat flea
    Cat flea
The photo of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern donated by Kirk Hargreaves and Christchurch City Council, where he was employed as photographer

One example of what seemed like a simple photo upload is a set of 1000 insect drawings by biological illustrator and artist Des Helmore. Helmore had retired ten years before, and these had been sitting on a hard drive unused; Landcare Research Manaaki Whenua agreed to release them under an open licence. I uploaded them with Pattypan and organised a Wikiblitz (Wikipedia:Meetup/Auckland/Wikiblitz 2) to get them used in Wikipedia articles, where they began receiving about 70,000 views a month. But as part of the upload I also created a Wikipedia article about Helmore, who was living alone in a small town far from Auckland. I visited, photographed, and interviewed him in the course my travels, and he passed on numerous other drawings he'd done. This led to an article about him in the national magazine North & South – illustrated with drawings from WikiCommons – and renewed recognition of his role as a significant biological illustrator.

Another unexpected event was the horror of the Christchurch mosque shootings in March of 2019. Schwede66 and I wrote about our response as Wikipedians in the Signpost (Wikipedia's response to the New Zealand mosque shootings). Immediately after the shootings, ephemeral floral tributes and posters appeared everywhere, in public places throughout New Zealand. I was conscious that the record of these would disappear, while coverage of the shootings themselves would become our main memory of the event. So I put out a call for public photography of the tributes, for adding to WikiCommons in the Category:Christchurch mosque shootings. This resulted in some battles with overzealous Commons editors who flagged many photos for deletion based on incidental soft toys, hand-drawn artwork, or even incorrect camera XIF data. Nevertheless, the effort was worth it, as I persuaded Christchurch City Council to release an iconic photo of PM Jacinda Ardern, later a featured image and one of the most memorable images of the tragedy.

Auckland Museum, one of the early supporters and hosts of the Wikipedian at Large project, gave a presentation at the 2018 National Digital Forum questioning the impact of museum websites compared with hosting the same information and images in Wikimedia projects. This was a great boost to GLAM insitutions in New Zealand taking my work seriously, and Auckland Museum continued to engage with and build on the Commons, Wikipedia, and Wikidata work I was doing.

Methods and activities

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Dates Place Institution Activities
2–27 July 2018 Wikipedia:Auckland
30 July – 9 Aug, 14–17 Aug 2018 Auckland
  • Negotiating with photographers to release photos to Commons
  • Wikipedia training for staff and freelance journalists
  • Improving web archive citation and testing Wikipedia referrals
10–13 Aug 2018 Wellington
18–22 Aug 2018 Auckland
25 Aug – 7 Sept 2018 Wikipedia:Dunedin
  • Presenting at SPNHC conference
  • Public talk, Wikipedians meetup, and presentation to Museum staff on engaging with Wikimedia
8–28 Sept 2018 Auckland
1–5 Oct 2018 Northland
6 Oct 2018 Auckland
  • Auckland War Memorial Museum
8–14 Oct 2018 Wikipedia:Wellington
  • Antistatic
16–18 Oct 2018 Wikipedia:Palmerston North
  • Wikipedia workshop for graduate students
  • Two presentations to Regional Council staff
19 Oct – 30 Nov 2018 Wellington
  • Talks at National Digital Forum and Wellington Archives
  • Presentations and workshops at Archives New Zealand, BRANZ, Forest & Bird.
  • Wikibrunch and "Wiki in the Pub" meetups for local Wikipedians
10–14 Nov 2018 Wikipedia:Melbourne
  • Wikimedia Australia meeting
3–7 Dec 2018 Wikipedia:Invercargill
11–21 Dec 2018 Wellington
9 Jan – 6 Feb 2019 Wellington
  • Wikidata workshop
  • Wikipedia meetups and drinks
  • Editing events on threatened species, NZ comics and cartoons, Wellington Botanic Garden
  • Adding Wikipedia:Alexander Turnbull Library authority list to Mix'n'Match
7–9 Feb 2019 Hanmer Springs
  • Conference Wikipedian
10–17 Feb 2019 Dunedin
  • Workshops for arts community on creating NZ artist articles
18–27 Feb 2019 Wellington
  • Running public editing events on NZ libraries, threatened species, and adding photos to Commons
28 Feb – 2 Mar 2019 Auckland
  • Critter of the Week editathon
19–21 March 2019 Palmerston North
  • Talks and editing events for faculty and students
22 March – 8 April 2019 Wellington
  • Talks and editing events
  • BioBlitz in Wellington Botanic Garden
10 April – 8 May 2019 Dunedin
  • Otago Museum
  • University of Otago
  • Public editing events and public talks
  • Wikipedia presentations to local GLAM sector, University faculty, and students
  • Bulk upload of Otago Museum images to Commons
9 May – 9 June 2019 Wikipedia:Christchurch
  • WikiEducation projects with university faculty and students
  • Presentation and workshops on getting NZ artists and writers into Wikipedia
10–26 June 2019 Nelson
  • Public talks and an edit-a-thon
  • Creative Commons image uploads from the museum collections
28 June – 2 July 2019 Wikipedia:Bangkok, Thailand
  • Regional meetup to discuss coordination of Wikimedia projects

For a full list of all public talks, events, and meetups over the course of the year, see this page.

A selection of media coverage:

Project resources

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Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

Monthly reports, project pages created, and blog posts

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Month Institution(s) Project pages Report Writing
May 2018 New Zealand Wikipedian-at-large
July 2018 Auckland Museum GLAM/Auckland Museum July Why engage with Wikipedia?
Aug 2018 New Zealand Geographic GLAM/NZGeo August
Sept 2018 Landcare Research GLAM/Landcare September
Oct 2018 Te Hiku Media, Antistatic, Massey University, Ministry for the Environment Edit for Equity 1, 2, 3, 4 October
Nov 2018 Melbourne Museum, Archives NZ, National Digital Forum NZWPAL/Melbourne November
Dec 2018 Department of Conservation, Wellington City Archives GLAM/DOC
GLAM/WCC Archives 		December
Jan 2019 Department of Conservation, National Library GLAM/DOC
GLAM/NLNZ
GLAM/Blue Oyster 		January NZ Comics and Cartoons edit-a-thon
Feb 2019 National Library, Forest and Bird, Zealandia GLAM/NLNZ
 February
Mar 2019 National Library, Massey University NZWPAL/Chch mosque shootings March Wikipedia's response to the New Zealand mosque shootings
Apr 2019 Otago Museum, Otago University GLAM/Wellington Botanic Garden BioBlitz

NZWPAL/Wikifying GLAM
GLAM/Otago Museum

April
May 2019 University of Canterbury GLAM/UCNZ May A digital strategy for a small museum
June 2019 Nelson Provincial Museum GLAM/Nelson Provincial Museum June A Wikimedia strategy for a radio station

Selected uploads

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Over 1700 images were uploaded to Commons as part of this project.

Learning

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What worked well

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The model of the Wikipedian at Large or "roving Wikipedian" attracted some interest at the ESEAP Strategy Summit in Bangkok immediately after the end of this project. I've created a learning pattern that outlines how a future such project could be set up. It has real potential in countries where large GLAM organisations are cautious about hosting a full-time WIkipedian in Residence, or where the population is widely dispersed and small organisations could benefit from a visiting WIkipedian running workshops and helping with a small project.

What didn’t work

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What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • The residency with Nelson Museum was unsuccessful, as the institution didn't have its digital photo collection stored in an easily-retrievable fashion, and was unhappy about releasing public domain photos without a CC BY licence guaranteeing credit – which I had to explain to them was impossible (a misunderstanding common amongst NZ GLAM institutions, which do not always have a good understanding of copyright). Careful explanation and education beforehand would have avoided this, but there's no time to do this when one is already doing careful explanation and education at the preceding institution. A clear memorandum of understanding document could include this and be part of future Wikipedian at Large residencies.
  • Te Hiku Media recorded 150 words in Te Reo Māori for upload to Commons – but this single file now needs to be broken into 150 separate sound files, correctly labelled with the word concerned, tagged with the correct metadata, and exported in an open file format. I didn't have the audio editing skills required to do this correctly, or the time to organise the bulk upload and deploy the pronunciations throughout Wikipedia, and should have thought of this before starting the recording process. The people concerned were so generous with their time I would be important to do the work as carefully and thoroughly as possible – which left it still sitting undone.
  • An attempt to arrange the upload to Commons of 17,000 natural history photographs taken by the late Phil Bendle, currently available only under a CC BY-NC-ND license, failed when the owners of the website realised the current traffic the photos were generating could be used to support their other business.
  • Volunteers were trained up, went to an edit-a-thon, but then we not supported as I moved on to a new area. If there's not already a Wikimedia community that can support them, I would recommend doing a circuit twice, so newbies could be revisited and take part in a second event.

Other recommendations

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  • It became obvious that some staff in an organisation might be keen to work with Wikimedia projects, but if the powers-that-be aren't supportive, interested, or even aware, it may be a frustrating experience. Notably, someone in management with control of staff and budget needs to decide that "Wikimedia is now a priority" and that money and people will be diverted from current projects and put into this new one.
  • Cultivating a relationship with one or two journalists is a good idea, and helping them with copyright problems, image crediting, or finding images in Commons is worthwhile.
  • Other recommendations I mentioned in the midpoint report and talked about in an National Digital Forum presentation bear repeating:
    1. "So you'll fix our Wiki page?": most GLAM organisations assumed I was there to create content for them, and improve their own organisational WIkipedia presence; I often had to remind them of their institutional mission statement.
    2. Build Wikipedia into exhibitions: Wikipedians need to work alongside developers in the research and exhibition process, not come along afterwards to try to properly negotiate licenses and track down citations.
    3. People show up to fix inequality and unfairness: correcting Wikipedia's gender imbalance or properly covering New Zealand culture and geography in a US-centred encyclopaedia is a powerful motivator, and a reasonable percentage of those new editors can be converted into regular contributors.
    4. Have a strategy for bulk uploads: simply dumping thousands of files into Commons isn't enough – institutions and Wikipedians need to organise press releases to announce this, public editing events that make use of the files, corresponding Wikipedia pages for image creators, and publications or merchandise that feature the images.
    5. Almost nobody understands Creative Commons, even in GLAM institutions, and many use an NC license for no very good reason (this got a round of applause at NDF)
    6. Take Wikidata seriously: over the last six months I've realised how central Wikidata will be to the future of Wikipedia and Commons, and have been building it into public editing events and my advice to institutions.
    7. A Wikipedian in Residence needs: about 6 months, Wikimedia champions inside the organisation, and a commitment from the leadership team to change an institution's direction and Wikimedia strategy.

Next steps and opportunities

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  • Forming a NZ Wikimedia Community User Group and beginning the path to affiliation
  • Supporting the formation or persistance of regular meetups in all NZ main cities
  • More discussion with the Māori community on how their concerns about data sovereignty and control over traditional knowledge could be reconciled with Wikimedia's open knowledge model
  • Encouraging active NZ editors to attend international meetings like ESEAP and WIkimania

Note from 2023: In mid-2019, the success of the project was unclear; four years on, its impact is still being felt.

At the March 2023 WikiCon – the third New Zealand Wikimedia Conference (I organised the first, in 2021) – the Wikipedian at Large project was repeatedly mentioned It spurred the formation of a User Group, which subsequently affiliated with the WMF and has just received its second annual grant. The three-year plan has funding for permanent staff members, recruiting Pacific Island editors, and a regular Wikipedian at Large contract to replicate the success of this one. Most of the committee of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, and several other highly active editors outside WANZ, were recruited or encouraged by me in 2018–2019. Auckland Museum now has a Wikipedian in Residence and an annual Wiki Workplan, based on a Wikimedia Strategy I wrote for them in 2020. Multiple New Zealanders have now attended ESEAP regional meetups, and a NZ delegation have received scholarships to Wikimania 2023. And Wikipedia is regularly in the news in NZ; subsequent Wikipedian at Large contracts have been covered on radio and TV. The New Zealand Wikipedian at Large project seems to have been the catalyst that led to the vibrant state of the NZ Wikimedia Movement today, compared to its relatively invisible and disconnected state in 2018.

Part 2: The Grant

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Finances

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Actual spending

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Expense Approved amount Actual funds spent Difference
Living expenses NZ$55,000 NZ$55,000 $0
Travel NZ$5,214 NZ$5,371.49 NZ$ -157.49
Conference registration NZ$1,200 NZ$1,861 NZ$ -661
Swag NZ$271 NZ$150.86 NZ$120.14
Total NZ$61,685.00 NZ$62,383.35 NZ$ -698.35


Differences between planned and actual expenditure:

  • Extra hotel night in Auckland when departure delayed.
  • National Digital Forum registration more expensive than planned, and invited to speak at an unplanned conference (Conservation Communicators).
  • Avalability of Wikimedia Foundation branded items, cost of shipping, and problems with NZ freight forwarding proved prohibitive. In future, giveaway swag should be locally printed.

Remaining funds

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No

Documentation

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Sent; budget spreadsheet can also be viewed in my Google drive

Confirmation of project status

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Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Yes

Is your project completed?

Yes

Grantee reflection

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Leaving a full-time job, putting my possessions into storage, and taking a year to travel the country as an essentially homeless Wikipedian was a bold move. But I think it was worth it. It seems to have kick-started New Zealand people and organisations thinking harder about the Wikimedia Movement, and recruited a new cohort of editors – mostly female, mostly keen to undertake cooperative projects and public meetups. It's certainly changed the direction of my career, and I'll be continuing to work on projects like this inside or outside of GLAM organisations, as an open knowledge or Wikimedia consultant. And it's brought me into contact with a wider world of WMF, regional groups, and national chapters in many countries, which can act as role models for the future of the Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand.


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