Welcome to Wikipedia Steph Strock This podcast is brought to you by Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum. Voice Actors When did the Titanic sink? Who built the pyramids? How big is an elephant? What even is Stonehenge? Why do onions make you cry? What’s a black hole? Is Timothee Chalamet single?
Anjuli Selvadurai Whether you're researching for a project, sneaking a glimpse at your phone in a pub quiz, or desperately trying to remember where you've seen that actor before…if you're trying to find something out, Wikipedia is quite often the light at the end of the internet tunnel. Wikipedia, the name comes from combining the Hawaiian word wiki, which means very quick and the last part of the word encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is a huge collection of information. It's a compilation of knowledge from across the world, crowdsourcing the things people want to know. Kia ora, I'm Anjuli Selvadurai, Auckland Museum's Wikimedian-in-Residence, and your host for this episode of The Amp. Today, we're shining a light on one of the museum's most far reaching, but also most invisible projects, getting our histories on the World Wide Web. My role is supported by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand. I'm what you'd call a Wikimedian, which means I contribute across Wikimedia platforms like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Wikimedians-in-residence work at all sorts of places, like universities, archives, museums, libraries and more. I come from a museums and arts background, so I feel pretty at home working for a museum. But really, anyone can be a Wikipedian. Our job is also to bring people together with Wikipedia as contributors, not just readers. We do this through community editing events called edit-a-thons, WikiProjects that focus on sharing museum knowledge and reflecting the kaupapa of an institution. And as a Wikimedian at the museum, I help share our knowledge on those platforms and out into the world. So why do we use Wikipedia? Here at Auckland Museum, we're home to over 5 million objects, each with their own stories. But what good is that information if it's behind closed doors? One of our biggest drivers at the museum is to open up the collection and share that information so as many people can benefit from it as possible. A lot of that work is done in person, welcoming people to come and learn from the collections. But did you know that we also have a lot of our collections online?
James Taylor Collections Online is the publicly accessible database of the collection records of the objects that the museum looks after, the scientific specimens that the museum looks after, and also the various documentary heritage materials that the museum looks after.
Anjuli Selvadurai That's James Taylor, our Online Collections Information and Partnership Manager here at the Museum. He's the data guy. With a lot of collections comes a lot of data, and James manages the people who look after the data that we put on the web through Collections Online. We're not looking for anything in return. The goal is connection, not clicks. James also works with partner organisations like Flickr, Google Arts and Culture and Wikipedia to get our information out there.
James Taylor One of the things that people often don't realise about museums is that people come in and they'll walk around and have a look at the taonga that's on display. But, you know, it's difficult to quantify, but generally speaking, it's only about 5% of the museum's content that's actually on the floor at any one time, so there's about 95% that's hidden away in storage, and without something like Collections Online, people wouldn't be able to see or to explore or research those collections.
Anjuli Selvadurai While we do welcome in-person sits with taonga, not everybody can make a trip in. One of the cool parts of Collections Online is the photos. Our photographers take amazing images of the collections. Some of them are in detail you wouldn't even be able to see with the naked eye. Being able to connect such high-quality imaging with the record actually opens up the collection in ways no-one would normally be able to appreciate in person and without damaging the object at all.
James Taylor So I just checked that this morning, and we have 989,705 records. We've got, there's about 178,000 of those records have downloadable images attached to them, and so that's about 350,000 reusable images. And I think there's about 500,000 images and total available on Collections Online. Anjuli Selvadurai There's a huge offering of things for people to look at, and they're often on their own little side quests.
James Taylor So last year, there was about 600 just over 600,000 views of Collections Online records. But what's really interesting is that of those 600,000 views, there were nearly 85,000 objects that were viewed. So it's actually a really long tail of the content that's viewed. And so, in general terms, the most viewed object may only have a couple of thousand views, you know, right down to an object that's only had two or three views. And so that's sort of speaks to the to the benefit of the work that we do, and the long term value of the work that we do is that content will be uploaded, data will be enhanced on the records, and you know that may be used 10 years down the track. There's a few different reasons that we put the content online. The main one is obviously access. So Auckland Museum is a publicly-funded museum, and as part of our mission, we aim to make as much of the collection accessible to Aucklanders, to people around New Zealand, and around the world as well.
Anjuli Selvadurai Getting our collections and our research online helps people track down the answers to their questions. We take it for granted now, but in the pre-internet world, finding something out took a bit of effort. You might have walked to the library, probably in some kind of adverse weather, learned how to use the Dewey Decimal system. Voice Actor 301.53.02
Anjuli Selvadurai Got out an actual book, or forked out for a massive set of encyclopaedias, or even sent off a letter in the hope that a kindly official might at some point respond with an answer to your request. Now, you simply take your request to Google, and it fetches a nice selection of sources for you to ponder, like our hero of this episode, Wikipedia.
James Taylor Wikipedia is a huge, globally accessible, volunteer-based encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. It's run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit organisation who maintain the website and support communities that have grown around Wikipedia, and also groups like us at the Museum.
Anjuli Selvadurai We might all know Wikipedia, but there's also a lot more than meets the eye, a whole range of data projects under the Wikimedia umbrella that aim to share knowledge in all its forms.
James Taylor The Wikimedia Foundation is the organisation that encompasses platforms such as Wikipedia, which is the free online encyclopaedia. Wikimedia Commons, which is a repository of free to use media, including the pictures that you see in a Wikipedia article. There's also Wikidata, a multilingual open database which supplements data from Wikipedia articles across over 300 languages. One of the benefits of working with Wikipedia is that there's a sort of a two-way relationship. We can make our content more accessible on Wikipedia, but with museums or other GLAM institutions contributing to Wikipedia, it also makes the content on Wikipedia more authoritative.
Anjuli Selvadurai GLAM institutions are what we in the biz call Galleries, Libraries, archives and museums. They're institutions that hold knowledge, but we're also a little glamorous too, hopefully…GLAM institutions are helpful to Wikipedia, whose goal is to represent ‘the sum of all human knowledge’, quite a lofty ambition.
James Taylor Sharing our collections on Wikipedia helps us massively increase our reach. For example, last year, we got 604,000 views on Collections Online, but on Wikipedia, our collections got 61 million views.
Anjuli Selvadurai How this works is that one of the ways we contribute to Wikipedia is through Wikimedia Commons, its free-to-use image repository. Some of the lovely photos taken by our photographers are put into Wikipedia, where they help illustrate the stories being told. One of our collection items is pretty much an internet celebrity. I'm sure you all guessed it…the Treaty of Versailles? This is thanks to Wikipedia. When you Google the Treaty of Versailles, it's our Auckland Museum copy that almost always comes up first – bit random eh? Well, here’s why…
James Taylor The Treaty of Versailles is a really interesting page for us, it is generally the most viewed page on Wikipedia every month. So it has, I just looked up the statistics. So in December last year, it had 274,000 views of that page alone. When you do the Google search, it pops up in the info box that's there, this image, but that image is also used on 120 other pages. So it's the most popular object that we have on there. And one of the reasons that it's on so many pages and get so many views is because that the cover of the Treaty of Versailles that we have in the Museum library was actually digitized in 2008 and was made available on one of the very early versions of the Museum website. Someone found it and uploaded it to Wiki Commons, and it's been there ever since. And then one of the other really random examples is we noticed a huge spike in a picture of a mug of the Queen Elizabeth's tour of New Zealand in the 1950s and we kind of looked at the analytics and it was coming from the Japanese page about Queen Elizabeth. So when she died, there was a massive rush of Japanese internet users to the Japanese Wikipedia page about Queen Elizabeth, and someone has randomly put that picture of the cup on the Japanese page about Queen Elizabeth. So who knew?
Anjuli Selvadurai Wikipedia is accessed and edited by people all over the world. If you edit a page, you have to present the information in a neutral way to keep it objective. Many Wikipedians across the world are working to fill the gaps through local and global initiatives, getting more users from across the world adding to Wikipedia helps close the net on these gaps and issues. With more input comes more knowledge.
James Taylor There are so many diverse histories that deserve to be represented in spaces like Wikipedia. So, in order to represent ‘the sum of all human knowledge’, we need to make sure all types of important histories and stories are being told.
Anjuli Selvadurai What do you do then, when input tends to come from places with more people and more editors, how can the Sky Tower compete with the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower? Down here in Aotearoa, we're a little used to being forgotten. Our population size is usually counted relative to sheep. We're often confused with Australia, and sometimes we’re left off maps all together. We're a small country at the edge of the world, but our stories still matter. In 2022, the decision was made to empower young New Zealanders to understand more about their own country, as part of the refreshed Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum, schools now look closer to home. The idea was to get our own history on the books, alongside the likes of Henry VIII and his six unfortunate wives. But that's where things get complicated.
Voice actor Divorced, died? Divorced, beheaded…divorce, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived!
Anjuli Selvadurai To nail down the basics on King Henry, you have centuries of books, plays, musicals, movies, YouTube essays, but little old Auckland, not so much. So where do you go? When your local history is a stub? A stub is wiki-speak for a stub article, which is a page with hardly any information or details. A mere placeholder on the internet waiting to be filled. Lucky for us, Marty Blayney knows a thing or two about our city and has been stomping out the stubs.
Marty Blayney I checked my stats, officially, I've made 904 pages. That's not counting the ones where they already existed, and I changed almost everything about them, but I think it's also counting some redirects. So yeah, let's say a thousand-ish, and I've edited 69,000 articles, Kia ora, my name is Marty Blayney. I'm the Wikimedian-in-Residence at Auckland Museum, or one of one of two now, actually,
Anjuli Selvadurai The other being me! Marty has been at the helm of a massive project to get Auckland's history online and accessible in a huge undertaking called ‘Understanding our Past’. Marty's work on Wikipedia has had over 21 million views. You may not know it, but if you're looking up Auckland, you're being treated to some of the most comprehensive Wikipedia pages out there. One by one, all the entries on suburbs of Auckland have been expanded, improved, enriched.
Marty Blayney Yeah, there's so many different suburbs, so so much content to get through. So we first started off with my local suburb. So when we started the project, I was living in Mangere Bridge. And so as a little trial run, we saw, what can we learn about Mangere Bridge, what sources are out there? How detailed can I make this page and how useful can I make this page? Anjuli Selvadurai First stop, Mangere Bridge, next stop, all of Tāmaki Makaurau.
Marty Blayney What we really wanted to prioritise was having something that would be useful to teachers, having something that would be useful to students. And so we looked through the list of where do people go to school? And so our number one priority was Manurewa, because there are 10,000 students who go to school in the Manurewa area, and so we work through this list of finding out, where are the students? Can we prioritise these pages? And so that's why we've gone through some of the biggest suburbs in terms of education. So we've got pages for Takapuna, Epsom, Mangere, Henderson, Howick, Papatoetoe, Bucklands Beach, Mount Roskill, Papakura, Flatbush, Browns Bay, Albany...
Anjuli Selvadurai So, we worked with teachers to understand how we can best help their students.
Marty Blayney We also moved on to some of the more larger geographical chunks of Auckland. So we've got areas such as East Auckland, South Auckland, North Shore. And we got some feedback from teachers that were explaining that they didn't need to necessarily know about the history of, let's say Papatoetoe, but if they had a history of South Auckland, that might be a lot more useful than the history of Auckland, because the history of Auckland is the history of Queen Street as it gets bigger and expands, which is not necessarily useful if you want to learn more about Papatoetoe.
Anjuli Selvadurai With Queen Street well and truly documented, Marty looks for other areas in our region that might have been overlooked.
Marty Blayney In Wikipedia, there's a concept called Notability. So if you're thinking about a traditional encyclopaedia like Britannica, there'll only be certain pages. It's not going to be a page on every single place person. So there's a few tests on who or what should have an article. And usually that means if scholars or people who have written about the subject think that that person is notable. So often, this means like, if it's if this is a person who's had been the subject of a very long interview, or a subject of a journal article, then they might be a notable person. So what I'm looking for is looking for the gaps. So what gaps are there? What would be really interesting, especially in a Tāmaki context, what buildings are missing, what people are missing, and if I find that, oh, this is somebody who a lot of people have written about before, then maybe they should have a page.
Anjuli Selvadurai It's a work in progress, with edits being made constantly. Marty Blayney We have edited 56 of the 200 suburbs on our list. There's a further 130 suburbs that we feel like there are places of importance that we would like to get to, but we've finished eight sub-regions across Auckland, places like North Shore, East Auckland, and 11 regional centres in the area, such as Helensville, Warkworth, Waiuku.
Anjuli Selvadurai So why did the museum choose Wikipedia? It's because it's most people's first port of call when looking for information online. It acts as a sort of springboard for other resources. And yes, you've probably wrinkled up your nose by now. We've all heard that Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, because anyone can edit it, and it's made by people who bring their own interests and blind spots, sure, but that might be some misinformation in itself…
Marty Blayney So anybody can edit, but not everybody does. The people who typically edit are people who are usually very passionate about the subject. So, there is somebody who works at Te Papa. Her name is Heidi, and she knows so much about Forget-Me-Not flowers. And so one day, she just decided she was inspired to write articles for every endemic New Zealand, Forget-Me-Not species. And Wikipedia articles, they have authors coming from all sorts of perspectives, like these people who are so passionate about the subject, they want more people to know more about these subjects. And at the same time, there are other people who are very passionate about making sure that Wikipedia is a reputable source. And so there's a lot of people who like to fact check things, and especially for very new editors, there's a lot of safety checks in place to make sure lots of people are reviewing the articles they put up, or look at the formatting of the articles and getting a better understanding of what biases these editors might have. When people look at a Wikipedia article, there's a bit of an inbuilt suspicion people have. They're like, they're thinking about who made this article. Why is it here? What kind of agenda do people have for people who read the article thinking about what the author's intentions are, or what their blind spots might be. These are actually issues for other sources, like newspapers or history books as well, but it tends not to be one of the main things that people focus on, but it is through Wikipedia. So that means we've got a bit of an opportunity to signal boost some really interesting works that are very informative or very valuable that people might not usually interact with. These things might be historical reports, Waitangi Tribunal reports, history books that maybe are out of print, and so people will be able to find where the information is coming from and see that trail of ‘oh, this is how a citation works’. This is where that came from, from this person's interpretation or from this organisation.
Anjuli Selvadurai Additions to Wikipedia need to be anchored by a credible source. If we're looking for a reason to not trust it, this is where old mate bias makes an entrance. People often speculate about what nefarious things are being added to Wikipedia, but not so much about the things that aren't there at all. Historically, an area that's been overlooked is iwi histories. On an internet where New Zealand hardly gets a look in. It might not come as a surprise that Te Ao Māori is lagging way behind in visibility.
Marty Blayney So there were quite a few pages that a lot of people were very passionate about and added as many facts as they could. Some of them were very bare bones. So you might have the demographics of who lives there, information about when the first church was founded, when the train station came, and that's about it. You wouldn't have any facts about Te Ao Māori, any facts about migrant groups who moved to the areas, the reasons why people lived in areas, nothing.
Anjuli Selvadurai Māori history and connection to the land is a deeply important part of our nation's past and present. English language, Wikipedia favours a western knowledge system, which means sometimes indigenous knowledge can fall outside of this. Oral histories, for example, don't mesh with the way Wikipedia wants to share information. User groups across the world are working on ways to diversify the way knowledge is shared. That's one of the benefits of striving towards a diverse user base. So people are representing their own histories in their own ways. At Auckland Museum, we approach this within the guidelines of data sovereignty, meaning ownership of information by the group it originates from.
Marty Blayney This is quite a tricky issue with Wikipedia articles, so if we include sources that discuss Te Ao Māori, we're taking away indigenous ownership of those sources, we're creating a worse facsimile. We're creating something lesser, and we're getting rid of that ability for people like Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei to make judgement calls around how a story is told and why. But if we don't include this information from Te Ao Māori sources, that means there's 700 years of history that's not there. It's invisible, it's inaccessible, and it means that people don't know where to find those sources. They don't know how to even start looking for ‘Who should I ask? What topics should I look for?’ So, there's no real perfect solution here. It feels like there's not really, it's not really possible to have a Wikipedia page that is preserving indigenous ownership while also being an international, freely editable, accessible thing that exists. But there are better and worse things that we can do within that scope. And so one of those things is to signal boost some of the best, highest quality, freely given sources that we have.
Anjuli Selvadurai As the information age progresses, these conversations become more important. Who owns information? Should it always be shared? Marty Blayney There's no one good answer. There's only worse answers and better answers. And the more we discuss history, the more we engage with history, the more that we can boost indigenous voices. I think the closer we are going to be to getting some of those better solutions.
Anjuli Selvadurai It's imperfect, but it's improving. Now there's a wealth of information for people to engage with. Today, you can go to Wikipedia and find out all these super interesting things about your neighbourhood, like that in 1938, 84 residents of Kingsland launched an unsuccessful petition to change the suburb’s name to Beverly Hills, because Kingsland, at the time had such a bad rep. Or you can discover the very first supermarket in the country was opened in Ōtāhuhu on the 18th of June 1958, when the first Foodtown was opened by Tom Ah Chee. Or that when Europeans established a settlement in Panmure in 1848, some called it Maggoty Hollow. Located on the Tāmaki River, this area was for a short time favoured to be the new capital of New Zealand. Can you imagine? There are huge lengths of information and delightful nuggets, some surprising even to the Wikipedia pros.
Marty Blayney There was a school in a suburb that was getting way too many views compared to other suburbs, and we couldn't really work out why. So this is the suburb of Waikowhai, which is around Hillsborough. And the reason was actually because one of the members of the K-pop group Black Pink went to school there. She went to Waikowhai Intermediate School, and, yeah, it's quite bemusing seeing why there were so many views for this, I thought it’s quite charming.
Anjuli Selvadurai In whatever way that looks, everyone should be able to build a connection to the place they live.
Marty Blayney So I still think that the Mangere Bridge page is something very nice. There was something really wonderful about living somewhere and then learning more about that place. So Mangere Bridge is one of the very few places in the world where you can see it's a certain type of lava flow called pahoehoe. And as you get into the beach areas, and as you get into the Manukau Harbor, you can see these wonderful flowing lava formations. I hadn't thought about them before, until they learned more about the history and how Mangere Bridge is formed. And I thought that was really fascinating and wonderful.
Anjuli Selvadurai History can feel like a lot, but it can be small and personal. There's history in our neighbourhoods and in the everyday.
Marty Blayney I think local history is important because it's the story of how your community came to be. It's something tangible in a way that a lot of the big national stories often can't be for people. History is a process of people telling stories, recounting stories, and other people collating, interpreting, synthesising these stories and finding meaning within them. So I feel like local history is often something much closer to that process than what you often get with these big stories. If you want to learn about an English King, then people have been interpreting history about that King for hundreds of years. That's not necessarily the same case if you're talking about Manurewa or Papatoetoe. I hope that this helps people engage with history, learn more about the places close to them, and maybe also get a bit angry about the gaps on the pages. Why isn't there anything about this? What can I do about it?
Anjuli Selvadurai The pages as they stand, are seeds. For anyone around the world to grow and share their knowledge. Marty Blayney One of the things I'd really like to come out of these Wikipedia articles is people noticing gaps and wondering, why haven't we talked about this really important thing? And then making sources, actually finding out about these things, publishing these things, so that we can get that into our Wikipedia articles, so people know about these important local stories.
Anjuli Selvadurai The streets that you walk on, the buildings that you pass, are all part of history and also a part of you. Marty's work on local histories cut a path for more editors to follow suit. With an eye on the launch of the updated Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum, the Museum was able to get funding for more editors to start enhancing local pages.
Aashish Ramanlal I am Aashish. I'm studying law, history and economics, and I'm working on a project with the Auckland War Memorial Museum on making Auckland's local histories more accessible for the New Zealand Histories Curriculum.
Kat Baker I'm Kat, I am doing my master’s in art history at the moment. I did an undergrad in history and art history, and I'm working on pages based on my art history background, mainly and also my local area, which is Mount Albert. So, we are summer students, and we're creating resources for students and teachers for the new Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum that has a focus on local history.
Anjuli Selvadurai Every summer, the Museum runs a summer scholarship programme, this is the second year, and among other projects, we've hosted a cohort of Wikipedia students, Aashish Ramanlal and Kat Baker are two of these summer students. They spot areas where articles can be made or expanded, which, in Auckland's case is sometimes quite a lot.
Aashish Ramanlal Currently I'm working on Alick Mewa. He was a World War Two Air Force pilot who was killed in action, and he was the first Air Force pilot of Indian descent, and so just having his biography more accessible for high school students would give them a broader perspective on World War Two, but also the discrimination that him and his family faced
Kat Baker I'm currently working on trying to identify some contemporary artists within Auckland and give them Wikipedias. And I've done a few already, but there was recently an exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery, Aotearoa Contemporary, and that had a lot of new artists who are sort of either quite new or sort of midway into their career. And I find it quite important to give them a page, because I feel like otherwise a lot of the time, especially artists, get more appreciated when they're like, old or even like passed away, and then, you know, their work gets like…we appreciate it too late. So it's quite cool for me to be able to start pages, even if they're quite small.
Anjuli Selvadurai By making space for new editors to come along new voices and perspectives get shared.
Aashish Ramanlal I'm a son of immigrants, and immigration stories aren't really that common on Wikipedia, and also, the New Zealand Histories Curriculum has a really strong emphasis on immigration and the fact that we're all immigrants, whether it's from Hawaiki or anywhere else in the world, right? And so that's the area that I chose to focus on, especially how it links to the New Zealand Histories Curriculum.
Kat Baker I've been drawn to artists because of my art history background, but I've also been drawn to articles just based on different historical women in general. So, I did one on Emily Patricia Gibson, who was more just like a feminist suffragette from the sort of 19th/20th century, because I have always liked to focus on women angles in my research. And I've also been doing some of my local history. I'm from, I'm not from, but I live in Mount Albert, so I've also been drawn to research my local history and see it's given me a new appreciation of what's actually in my suburb, like just around the corner from me how much history there is. So that's kind of why I've wanted to explore those areas as well.
Anjuli Selvadurai Their work spans a huge range of topics. Phomen Singh, an early New Zealand migrant from India and renowned confectioner. Samoa House, the former Samoan consulate and now grassroots library. Charles Mackay, one time mayor of Whanganui-turned attempted murderer...These contributions are filling in the gaps one by one.
Aashish Ramanlal Well, most historians focus on the big picture, right? They focus on things like national identity and progress, but the most progress that happens, happens on a micro level. And so one of the articles that I wrote about was the statue of Sir George Grey, and the local history of that statue basically went through waves. So initially it was met with a lot of admiration that the statue was built. But then people started being more critical about the statue and what it stood for, and so presenting those big picture ideas, focusing on the smaller, granular aspects of history would be quite useful for history students.
Anjuli Selvadurai The summer students either make articles from scratch or pick up where other people have left off.
Kat Baker I thought that there would be a lot of people that I wanted to do, especially sort of some of the older artists, and they already had an article. And I was quite surprised by that, but then I quickly realised that they were actually really tiny articles. They weren't really referenced properly. So it was definitely someone just coming along and starting as many as possible, hoping that someone would come back later and actually make proper, full length articles. But yeah, I think, I yeah, it was cool to see how many people are obviously working to get those names out for then other editors to come through when they can and expand on them.
Anjuli Selvadurai Having not too long ago, been high school students themselves, the summer students are navigating through the sometimes-patchy histories of Auckland and finding that it's not always what they expected.
Aashish Ramanlal I wish people would know about how diverse the areas around immigration history are. So, for example, I just wrote about a Croatian newspaper, and there was definitely a lot of drama that happened. A lot of it was very juicy or spicy. There was a defamation case. And so even the immigration stories of New Zealand, they're not just very boring. It's not just this person came over. There's a lot of discrimination. And so, there's a lot of layers to that those stories.
Anjuli Selvadurai Part of the goal of the wiki summer students programme is to break down the idea that this work is off limits to young people, and by working with students, it's young people who get to decide what goes up on Wikipedia. The average Wikipedia editor is often middle aged and older, which makes sense, as they have a lot of knowledge and experience to impart. But it's also good to have young contributors to fill in the generational gaps, like, what is brat? Is Charlie XCX a password? It's all about balance.
Aashish Ramanlal That's why we hosted an edit-a-thon on the 25th of January, which was aimed to stub out a lot of the Auckland stub articles, and we got plenty of young people who attended that, and they were very passionate about our project and Auckland's local histories.
Kat Baker Yeah, I guess I also hope that people can see some of the articles we've done, but also realise that they don't have to be experts on a certain area to go and contribute to Wikipedia. I mean, I didn't know anything about like Mount Albert or historic heritage homes, but I did the Alberton or I enriched the Alberton page. I went and took photos of the rooms, and I added them up to Wiki Commons so that they're freely licensed so anyone can use them without any copyright issues, just things like that, just knowing that they can see kind of what we've done, and actually they can do that too.
Anjuli Selvadurai Students deserve to see themselves represented in history. Knowing that you're a part of your local history helps you get excited about it.
Kat Baker I think that when you're going through school and you're learning about history, it can feel quite overwhelming. Even the word ‘history’, it just kind of means like anything that's happened in the past. And so when you start to really emphasise local context, it becomes way more relevant to you instantly. And I think that's really important for especially school-aged kids, to start to get an appreciation of where they live, where they go to school, where they maybe work around the city, just all the things that have shaped how it looks today. It can also, it just makes history a lot more exciting as well, to know that this actually happened right where you're standing now.
Anjuli Selvadurai With its team of editors, the content on Wikipedia is constantly evolving and improving. Having a Wikipedia page really means something in the internet age. In some ways, it's a goal post of recognition. If having your name in lights is a measure of success, so too is having your name in blue. So what do I mean by blue text? I'm looking here at the page for Dame Whina Cooper. As I start reading through immediately people, words or events from her life are coming up in blue text, and they link to another page that's all about that topic. It's like a spider's web of interconnected knowledge. When I hover over the blue words with my mouse, it shows me a little blurb about that topic. So for example, with Dame Whina, the first set of blue text are pages about the Official Royal Honours she's received, like her ONZ and DBE. There are also blue links to a page about the 1975 Māori Land March, and one that explains what a kuia is. This helps to build a bigger picture and provide context when researching a topic. But words can be in red too, like here, where it says she was succeeded as the first president of the Māori Women's Welfare League by a woman called Mīria Logan. Mīria’s name appears in red, which means she doesn't have her own page. Yet, if someone writes a page for Mīria, it can link back to Dame Whina’s, and the web continues to grow. As of January 2025, women have finally cracked 20% of biographies on Wikipedia. Men might be about half of the population, but somehow, they make up over 80% of all Wikipedia biographies. Women In Red is a WikiProject which addresses this gender bias. It aims to increase and improve Wikipedia content about women's histories, issues and biographies, turning red hyperlinks blue and evening the imbalance. One woman whose name we've been able to add to the score is Bertha Grace Nurse.
Sophie Elborough Bertha Grace Nurse was a nurse by both name and profession. She was born in Southland in 1871 and completed her nursing training in 1904 in Wellington. And at the age of 43 she was the first New Zealand nurse to enlist in the Expeditionary Forces. That's the military force sent from New Zealand to fight alongside other British Empire troops in World War One. Her sister Louisa was also a nurse. It was a bit of a family trade by the sounds of it.
Anjuli Selvadurai This is Sophie Elborough, Collection Technician and Research Support for the Online Cenotaph.
Sophie Elborough Online Cenotaph is a living memorial honouring those who served Aotearoa New Zealand in times of international conflict. It enables researchers, enthusiasts, veterans and their families to research, engage with and commemorate the service of New Zealand's military personnel. My role focuses on researching our military history and preserving these stories for future generations.
Anjuli Selvadurai Among her many well studied and thoughtful pieces, Sophie has written articles like this about our military nurses.
Sophie Elborough Nursing was a hugely important part of the war effort, but their contributions, like so many who served in non-combat roles, were underrepresented in history. Nurses kept soldiers alive and alleviated pain, often in pretty traumatic circumstances, all the while facing prejudice and fighting for recognition. This was particularly challenging at a time when women didn't always experience the independence we consider totally normal today. Bertha Grace Nurse joined the New Zealand Army Nursing Service Corps on the 10th of August 1914, and was quickly selected to be one of six New Zealand nurses to be stationed at Apia Hospital as part of the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces.
Anjuli Selvadurai It's not widely known that New Zealand's first involvement in the First World War was not actually in Europe, but closer to home. At the request of the British Imperial Government, the New Zealand forces seized German-occupied Samoa. It was seen as strategically important because of its location and powerful radio transmitter.
Sophie Elborough Bertha was stationed up here till March 1915, returning home to go and serve in Egypt aboard the SS Rotorua in April 1915, where she rose the rank of Matron of Pont de Koubbeh hospital. Anjuli Selvadurai We might all be familiar with male ranks like Lieutenant and Colonel, but less so when it comes to female ranks. Bertha becoming a Matron is actually the equivalent to Major.
Sophie Elborough Later, she was transferred to England to be Matron at the number one New Zealand General Hospital in Brockenhurst. Working there until 1917, Bertha was called to London, where she was told she would be recalled back to New Zealand. After some confusion, it was found out that this request was made by her medical officers purely due to friction between Bertha and the officers. Although she requested to remain in England, she was repeatedly denied and returned to New Zealand as Matron aboard the HMNZT Maunganui.
Anjuli Selvadurai Bertha continued nursing and served with the New Zealand war effort across the globe. She was the first New Zealand nurse in World War One to receive the royal Red Cross First class, alongside five other awards for her service. Sophie Elborough She lived a long life and died in 1960 in Christchurch at age 89. She served at some of New Zealand's most defining moments in our history, and I think that's a story that deserves to be known.
Anjuli Selvadurai Sophie's article was able to be referenced as a source in Bertha Nurse’s Wikipedia article. History isn't just made up of kings and powerful men. History is everything, even the people who don't get the spotlight. Women In Red is about evening the balance, and hopefully you'll be able to uncover even more about these histories or even improve articles on your own. At Auckland Museum, it's our job to document Auckland's history. We get to uplift our stories of people, places and phenomena. It's our way of saying ‘this thing matters’. By putting information on Wikipedia, we get to link it to a huge network of people working to make knowledge free and accessible. In an internet age of subscriptions and ads, Wikipedia is a free portal to ever-growing rabbit holes of information. No wonder it's always in the top five most visited websites in the world, and no wonder some people have even been moved to compose songs about it.
This episode was written and produced by Steph Strock and me, Anjuli Selvadurai. Sound Design by Sara O'Brien, with production support from Laura Skerritt. The executive producer was Teresa Cowie from Connect Content. Thanks to our guests, James Taylor, Marty Blayney, Aashish Ramanlal, Kat Baker and Sophie Elborough. For more information about our work on Wikipedia, Collections Online, and for our cenotaph stories, visit the link in our show notes.