New Zealand's first (and currently only) Wikipedian-at-large Mike Dickison has been working hard to make more New Zealand information and content freely available, and encourage more Kiwis to contribute.
Mike Dickison Photo: By Lanipai - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62132150
Nine to Noon spoke to Dickison when he was starting the job, which aims to encourage people and institutions to get involved and bring more New Zealand information to the online encyclopedia.
Dickison has been making great strides in encouraging more New Zealand content onto the site.
"We’ve been doing a mixture of me being a Wikipedian in residence at research institutions and museums where I try and work with staff to get them excited ... and we look at some projects that we can do to make a big difference to New Zealand’s visibility on Wikipedia.
"I started off in Auckland for three months based at Auckland museum and New Zealand Geographic magazine, and then at landcare research.
Photo: Provided
"Now I’ve been in Wellington for a few months, I’ll be here all summer long - until April, in fact - then heading down to the South Island to Christchurch, Dunedin an Nelson."
His work includes updating content from local archives and museums, for example he recently helped update information on Wellington's mayors after he noticed the entry had no photo of Mark Blumsky who was mayor from 1995 to 2001.
"Right now I’m based at the Wellington City Council archives which are a lovely institution kind of underneath a parking garage, and nobody knows they’re there but they have a lovely collection of historic photographs of Wellington and stuff going back right back to 1842.
"I asked them for help and they pulled out a bunch of beautiful colour prints taken by official council photographer Neil Price showing Blumsky clowning around and doing his mugshots."
Wellington's mayor in 1996, Mark Blumsky, juggling. Photo: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons / Neil Price / Wellington City Council
Those were added to Wikimedia commons with Dickison's help.
"Once you start pulling a thread it doesn’t really stop, most institutions don’t quite realise they’re sitting on all this wonderful material that’s not available to anyone but that could really make a huge difference to their representation in New Zealand."
He's also been up in Northland, sourcing more content for te reo Māori Wikipedia.
"There are 300 language Wikipedias and the Māori one has just sat stagnant really for some time, and we’re desperately in need of te reo speakers, fluent te reo speakers, to just take it over and do something with it.
"They can do anything they like with it, it’s potentially a marvellous resource."
There's te reo Māori content to be added to the English language version too.
"There’s often Māori words like ‘Aotearoa’ which will have pronunciations beside them in some cases, sometimes evewn little recorded clips, soundbites ... some of those were not very good and some were missing completely, so I spent the afternoon at Te Hiku Media with fluent te reo Māori speakers who very kindly recorded 150 words in te reo and signed them over to the public domain."
New Zealand's wiki-problem
He explains New Zealand is far behind many other countries when it comes to Wikipedia.
"If we look at Wikipedia stuff just related to New Zealand, we’re about five years behind - five to seven years, based on what the encyclopedia was like back then.
"Some of the articles were a bit unreliable back then, but if you look at say a topic like the New Zealand National Archives and compare it to the national archives of Britain or Sweden or any comparable-sized country you can see our coverage is really pretty poor, it’s a pretty shoddy effort."
Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller
He points out that's not the fault of the New Zealand Archives.
"They’re not allowed to go in and fix their own Wikipedia page - they’ve actually got conflict of interest rules that stop them from doing that, it’s a reflection of the number of engaged editors out there in the New Zealand community, we just don’t have that many people.
“We found the stats, last year there were only 260 really hardcore wikipedians in New Zealand, that’s people that edit a few times a week.
"That’s pretty small, there’s a couple of hundred thousand wikipedians who do that sort of regular editing around the world so 260 for a whole country’s not very large.
What can be done?
He says no qualifications or contributing to Wikipedia
"Anyone can come along and volunteer to do things like check new articles and see if they are meeting all the criteria, if they have enough sources.
"There's no heirarchy of bosses that can shut down or stop things. There are admins whose only power is really to boot people off wikipedia if they misbehave or are disruptive.
"Anyone can just go to Wikipedia, read the help and start editing ... we’ll be running events in areas all over New Zealand, trying to get volunteer editors up and running."
Dickison says 38 new editors have been recruited at ‘Edit for Equity’ edit-athon events in November as part of the New Zealand Wikipedian at large project.
"I’ve been running some of them, but it’s really nice to see other people in the community are now diving in and starting to host their own events."
He also says that although institutions are not allowed to edit their own pages, they can also do more to support volunteer editors to do so.
"They can help them out, they can host them, they can feed them information, feed them pizza. There are lots of good ways that institutions and the volunteers can help each other."
Waving the red flag
Dickison says people should not be put off if their articles are "flagged for deletion".
"Which sounds terrible, but all it means is that ‘please try and improve this article and get more references and boost it up so that it meets this criteria and then you can take that tag off.
"So here’s an example, Jo Bailey who's a designer here at Massey Wellington organised a causal get-together for some brand new editors to try and improve the presence of New Zealand women in design in Wikipedia.
"She created an article for Holly McQuillan who is another designer here at Massey who’s involved in zero waste projects and so forth.
"Someone came along and flagged it with that scary red box that said ‘flagged for deletion’ but ... sent it as a prod basically, to prod people to improving it.
"Seven completely different people from all over the world have all come in and tried to improve the article and added references, added citations, formatted it properly."
