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

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue II, February 2024

New Zealand report

WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions, wrapping up the Auckland / Tāmaki Makaurau local histories project, and the Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large

WikiProject Te Papa Research Expeditions

Ambrosia10 has recently received funding from Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand to undertake a Wikidata WikiProject on research expeditions at New Zealand's National Museum Te Papa. The aim of the project is to trial the current research expeditions schema proposed by Wikidata WikiProject Research Expeditions by enriching Wikidata with data on research expeditions undertaken by Te Papa, its predecessors the Dominion Museum and the Colonial Museum and their staff.

Any issues with the schema raised during this project will be discussed with both interested staff at Te Papa as well as WikiProject Research Expedition participants and the wider Wikidata and Biodiversity community. These discussions will aim to improve the research expedition schema as well as elicit recommendations for best practice when implementing the same. The plan is to resolve as many issues as possible prior to the WikiProject Research Expeditions and the TDWG Research Expeditions working group publishing recommendations and/or a Biodiversity Information Standards TDWG data standard guiding other institutions when undertaking similar Wiki work.

Ambrosia10 intends to encourage Te Papa to make use of the research expedition QIDs created or enriched during the project in the institution's collection management system. The intention is to also train interested Te Papa staff to create or enrich Wikidata research expedition items, to undertake outreach both with Te Papa staff and other natural history institutions in New Zealand by presenting on the project and also to run a public facing workshop on Wikidata and research expeditions at or near the end date of the project.

For those wanting more information, the Te Papa Research Expeditions WikiProject page can be found here.

Wrapping up the Auckland Museum local histories project

February marks the end of Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira's Alliance Fund Project Understanding our past:using Wikipedia as a tool to support local history in Tāmaki Makaurau. The full progress across this and past Auckland Museum projects can be seen here, and includes improved pages on:

Eight subregions of Auckland
11 regional centres of the Auckland Region
74 pages on suburbs

In addition, as a part of the project we hosted Four summer students who learnt how to edit Wikipedia pages, led an edit-a-thon, and created or improved 35 articles focusing on migrant communities, queer history, natural history, indigenous history, and community facilities such as parks, churches and Hindu temples. The students also wrote two DIFF blogs:

While there remain many suburbs and localities that still need to be improved, 66% (160,382) of students in the Auckland Region now have an improved Wikipedia page for their school's suburb, and 98% (237,971) of students in the Auckland Region now have a page for the wider geographic area where their school is located.

The final stages of the project involve improving the Auckland and History of Auckland pages, and reviewing what aspects of the project were most helpful/beneficial, and what could have been improved.

Problems encountered during the project

Many areas do not have up-to-date sources for history, most evident in greenfield areas (newly established suburbs on the city limits), and areas where demographics have significantly changed over time, such as Howick and Papatoetoe, where large Chinese, Pasifika, Indian and urban Māori communities are not represented.
Many local history books are imperfect, especially when discussing the distant past. Many Auckland Region books entirely ignore pre-1840 history (a time period that covers indigenous histories and early interactions with Europeans, such as whalers). This does not necessarily mean that the books are invalid, just that they need to be supplemented with other perspectives. Some of the best sources (e.g. West: The History of Waitakere (2009)) incorporates multiple indigenous voices, and better sources such as Mt Albert Then and Now: a History of Mt Albert, Morningside, Kingsland, St Lukes, Sandringham and Owairaka (2016) incorporate well-researched histories (but without a direct indigenous voice).
- Many sources that discuss indigenous histories stop at colonisation, and don't discuss what happened to indigenous groups in the 20th century onwards.
- Many local history books are imperfect when discussing European/modern histories. Many of these focus on preserving stories from the early colonial era, or early 20th century, and completely disregard any events that happened in the last 40 years).
- Many Auckland history books tell history from a single perspective: the story of the Auckland city centre as it expands.
Some indigenous iwi and hapū of the Tāmaki Makaurau area (e.g. Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua, Te Ahiwaru, Ngāti Kahu) have not gone through the Waitangi Tribunal process, meaning that there are no well-researched historic reports for these groups that can inform pre-colonial histories.
Suburb borders are vague in Auckland. While some areas are well-defined, others are not (especially wider geographic subregions - pages such as West Auckland and South Auckland continue to have edit wars about what areas are included).
History articles, by nature, are imperfect. There is no clear end-point where all aspects of a place have been comprehensively discussed. This does not mean that these articles shouldn't be made, just that these pages can never satisfyingly be completed; only incrementally improved in the future.

Recommendations for local history pages

Ensure that indigenous history is represented, at the very least the names of indigenous groups, reasons why people settled here, and if the area has been colonised, how this happened.
- Ideally, indigenous history should be sourced from indigenous authors (and if there are multiple groups from the area, ensure that all groups are represented if possible)
- Ideally, indigenous history should be sourced from willingly given recent documents (works such as court case proceedings or ancient works by ethnographers are not ideal; works not involving any indigenous voices/perspectives at all should be discouraged)
- Legends/stories are important. Even if these are clearly supernatural or cannot be confirmed, these help to develop a picture of how people of the past understood the area.
Describe what the land was like before human occupation and urbanisation. What kind of plants and animals thrived here? Did the area look different during the Last Glacial Maximum?
Describe why people moved to the area in modern times (e.g. why colonial settlers moved there, why major population booms happened).
What happened in the area during major historical milestones (in Aotearoa New Zealand, common major points include the arrival of trains, industrialisation/development of sheep and dairy farming, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, suburbanisation/development of motorways, migration, and globalisation)
Consider what your sources are missing. Are there any major groups in the area today (e.g. ethnic communities, religious groups) who are not discussed in local history documents? Are there ways to incorporate information about these groups into the page?
Even if print sources cannot be incorporated into a Wikipedia page easily, these can be listed as additional sources on pages.

Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large

The Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large project has entered its second month, and Mike Dickison is now based at the Christchurch Art Gallery. Last month at Cass he photographed its small railway station, immortalised in an iconic painting by New Zealand artist Rita Angus. The Christchurch Art Gallery owns the painting Cass, which is out of copyright in New Zealand but not the USA. Mike improved the article about Cass, using print resources and catalogues in the gallery archives, and asked Flickr photographers who had uploaded shots of the station at different times in its history to change their image licence to a Commons-compatible one.

While doing this, he noted that at least 16 different New Zealand institutions held works by Rita Angus, but their websites used a variety of copyright and licensing statements: some like Christchurch Art Gallery stated correctly that Rita Angus works were out of copyright, others gave various restrictions to reuse, and still others claimed Angus's copyrights were held by the Rita Angus Trust and the works could only be reproduced with their permission. A blog post comparing and contrasting this array of statements is forthcoming.

Another Christchurch Art Gallery project was on the 2023 exhibition Ink on Paper, which showcased the work of 49 New Zealand printmakers active in the 1910s to the 1950s. Some of these works are out of copyright in the USA, and the gallery has agreed to supply high-quality images to add to Wikimedia Commons. Others are out of copyright in New Zealand, but can still be featured on Wikipedia articles using the Fair Use provisions in US copyright law. Some time was spent cleaning up the Wikidata on the 49 artists, but 15 had no Wikipedia article—so Mike has organised an edit-a-thon to create these (and improve the others) in May in the Art Gallery library, where Wikipedians will be able to make use of the extensive files of press clippings and exhibition catalogues. As well as this edit-a-thon there is now a series of monthly Christchurch Wikimedia meetups.

To enable easier citation in Wikidata, Mike created the item Q118224886 for the Ink on Paper catalogue (now out of print, but which the art gallery has made available as a free PDF on its website). He then tried creating a Wikidata item for the exhibition itself: Ink on Paper (Q124733840) is now, surprisingly, the best-documented museum exhibit in Wikidata, with 17 properties. Although over 1000 exhibits from MoMA have been added to Wikidata, they're less thoroughly specified. Mike has written a short guide to creating an exhibit item in Wikidata and updated the Cradle template. Over the next couple of months he will be giving presentations to both gallery staff and the general public on Art and Wikipedia, and making the case for an art institution uploading its exhibition history to Wikidata to help researchers and enable creative data visualisations.

Next "New Zealand report" →

← Previous "New Zealand report"