Help improve Wikipedia articles about New Zealand species!
On Sunday, 29 May 2016, the Friends of Te Papa will be hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon focused on adding New Zealand plant and animal species to Wikipedia. The edit-a-thon will occur from 10:00-17:00 NZST at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand. You can sign up here to attend in person. You can find more information about the event here.
Participants from all over the world are also encouraged to join in remotely! Follow #NZspecies on Twitter to get updates from the event as it happens as well as to ask questions while you edit Wikipedia pages. Just be sure to add the hashtag #NZspecies to the edit summary for any content you create in Wikipedia prior to saving so that your contributions can be recorded. If you’d like to participate remotely, you can add your Wikipedia username to the “Attending remotely” section at the bottom of the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon page.
BHL has lots of great resources that you can use to do research on New Zealand species and enhance Wikipedia pages. These include:
- Images of New Zealand species. Here’s a collection of over 650 of them in Flickr. View these instructions to see how to add images to Wikicommons.
- BHL has a wealth of publications about New Zealand.
- Finally, need to find information about a specific species? Search for it in BHL using our taxonomic name finding tool and discover all of the publications in BHL that mention that species.
One of the edit-a-thon organizers, Siobhan Leachman (whom we’ve interviewed on our blog before in relation to her extensive citizen science activities) also recommends the following resources in BHL:
- Illustrations of the New Zealand Flora, Vols 1 and 2 by T. F. Cheeseman. Siobhan has created a spreadsheet providing taxonomic information for the species in these images, as well as identifying which ones are needed for Wikicommons and which species are absent from Wikipedia.
- Anything written by George Vernon Hudson but especially his classic An elementary manual of New Zealand entomology. As Siobhan says, “New Zealand endemic beetles and moths are crying out for more articles.”
- The Ross Expedition described many New Zealand species for the first time so the publication about the expedition, Zoology of the voyage of the H.M.S Erebus and Terror, is also very useful.
- Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, which, Siobhan says, “is just full of material that can be cited in Wikipedia articles.”
Grace Costantino served as the Outreach and Communication Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library from 2014 to 2021. In this capacity, she developed and managed BHL's communication strategy, oversaw social media initiatives, and engaged with the public to excite audiences about the wealth of biodiversity heritage available in BHL. Prior to her role as Outreach and Communication Manager, Grace served as the Digital Collections Librarian for Smithsonian Libraries and as the Program Manager for BHL.
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