Wikiproject - Edit-a-thon & Walking Tour May 2024

The Edit-a-thon & Walking Tour were organised as part of the ongoing New Zealand Women in Architecture Wikiproject. It was inspired by Elizabeth Cox’s groundbreaking book Making Space which documented over 500 female architectural workers in the history of New Zealand’s built environment.

Wikipedia is one of the largest free, and accessible sources of knowledge online. However, women still make up less than 20% of the biographies on wikipedia and our goal is to try to minimise that gender gap in the digital realm. This is done through creating new pages or improving existing pages.

The edit-a-thon aims to broaden the diversity of Wikipedia editors, as well as increase the number of articles on NZ women architects.

Improving the quality of the pages can be done through photos - photos must be in the public domain to be used in Wikipedia. This is what the walking tour endeavours to achieve. Participants are asked to take photos at each stop to then donate to the public domain, to help document the great work our architects.

The two concurrent events begun at 10am, with our editors meeting up at the Learning Labs, at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and our walking tour kicking off at the Ellen Melville Centre.

Yvette Overdyck was the first architect to speak on the walking tour and discussed her contributions as project architect for the Ellen Melville Centre.

Next stop was the Civic Theatre and Auckland Town Hall, on which Ainsley O’Connell spoke about being project architect for the refurbishment and construction process.

Kitty Fan then spoke about her work on the alterations and additions for Alfred Nathan House, at the University of Auckland.

The clock tower at the University was also visited as an unexpected stop with architect Justine Goode discussing briefly her work on the alterations. Goode was also the project architect for the Auckland War Memorial Museum alterations. She took us around the exterior, south atrium, and the various exhibition halls to discuss some of the challenges and details of the refurbishment.

Meanwhile our editors spent the morning learning the ropes of wikipedia editing - particularly around conflicts of interest, neutrality, and notability. Lisa Maule led our tutorial and helped our mostly new editors edit their first pages. The editors joined the walking tour for the museum section, and we all headed up for a lunch break.

After lunch Lisa demonstrated an example of how to upload photos to Wikipedia Commons. Notable discussions included how photos of buildings did include work of others, and the copyright surrounding art on buildings in public spaces. Walking tour participants uploaded their photos and editors finished off the articles they were working on.

We shared our learnings and highlights of the day, before closing the event.

Outcomes

Over 70 photos were uploaded to the wikipedia commons. These consisted mostly of the walking tour and contained new photos of Ellen Melville Centre, Civic Theatre, Auckland Town Hall, Alfred Nathan House, Auckland University Clock Tower, and the Auckland Museum, as well as their associated architects. Additionally, many of the A+W NZ Awards photos, which we obtained copyright permission from the photographer to upload and use on Wikipedia.

We also introduced 11 new users to wikipedia. Overall 6 new articles were made, 19 improved with photos and other information, 3 updated wikidata items. More details of the outcomes can be found on the meetup page.

Thank you to Aotearoa Wikimedia group for being a generous sponsor, to Lisa Maule for giving her time and expertise to the group, and to the Auckland War Memorial Museum for hosting us!