GLAM/Newsletter/October 2023/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue X, October 2023

New Zealand report

Biodiversity Information Standards Conference 2023 (TDWG2023) and the Entomological Collection Network Meeting (ECN2023)

Biodiversity Information Standards Conference 2023 (TDWG2023)

Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand provided me (User:Ambrosia10) with funding to attend, in person, the Biodiversity Information Standards Conference (TDWG 2023). More about the society can be found here on it's website. This conference was held in Hobart from 9th to the 13th of October and was hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia and the National Research Collections Australia. Many of the attendees and participants were representing natural history museums and institutions. The conference was an amazing opportunity for me to reconnect and enrich existing relationships with attendees and participants in the biodiversity information standards community and also to network and make new connections. It gave me the opportunity to advocate for more engagement with various Wiki projects but most particularly Wikidata.

I, along with Dag Endresen (from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum), had the opportunity to help raise awareness of our Wikidata WikiProject Research Expeditions project. I also co-led a popular unconference session during the conference with David Fichtmueller from the Berlin Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum. We instructed attendees on the process of making a Wikidata property proposal. David and I were particularly keen to ensure that attendees of our session gained a more in depth knowledge on the property proposal process in order to obtain a wider range of natural history people identifiers added into Wikidata.

As part of my obligations undertaken to obtain funding, I produced a conference report which can be found on a subpage of my English Wikipedia userpage. I felt privileged to have been able to attend, to learn, and to contribute to community discussions concerning biodiversity data and data standards. I am extremely grateful to Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand for providing me with this opportunity.

Entomological Collections Network Meeting 2023 (ECN2023)

I (User:Ambrosia10) was invited to present at the annual ECN2023 on the 5th of November. I gave a presentation on "Connecting Entomological Collectors through the Wikiverse". This presentation introduced attendees to Wikidata and gave information on how to go about researching biographical information on entomologists in order to enrich their Wikidata items. I gave further information on the reuse of a Wikidata Qid in such platforms as Bionomia. I also explained how this research and reuse can be used to generate Wikipedia articles should there be sufficient secondary sources to hurdle the Wikipedia notability criteria. I gave examples of round tripping of Wikidata Qids in GLAM collection management systems and websites. I concluded by pointing attendees to particular resources to assist them in their Wiki editing journey. My slides for this presentation can be found here.

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