This space tracks the progress made during this project.
December 2025
- The project is established through the 2025/2026 Wikipedia summer studentship with Auckland War Memorial Museum and the New Zealand Maritime Museum.
Week 2
The students arrived at the Maritime Museum for the first time and was able to explore the library and collections. Through these introductions topics of interest were generated, including:
- The NZMM fleet
- WW1 Hospital Ships
- Hauturu (Little Barrier Island)
- Gratton James Grey (WW2 prisoner of war)
- Rapaki
- Rangitane
We were also introduced to Vernon and how to search the collections.
Week 3
We continued to make progress on researching Breeze and Nautilus, two boats that are berthed at NZMM and part of their fleet. SydneyBridgeUpsideDown went on a tour of Blue Water Black Magic, one of the exhibitions to learn more about New Zealand’s history with sailing competitions on the international stage through the America’s Cup.
A banner was made for future uploads of images from the NZMM online collections.
Week 4
We continued to research for our articles. SydneyBridgeUpsideDown and Goose276 had a look at the Category: New Zealand Maritime Museum and identified where there was potential to take our own photos of the museum. We then went on a photowalk around the NZMM to take photos to upload onto Wiki Commons. These were uploaded using a CC BY 4.0 license so that other Wikimedia users can freely use these images as well.
Week 5
After a nice break we returned to the Maritime Museum and made progress on our articles. Goose276‘s article on the Nautilus was published and is now researching Ted Ashby, a scow part of NZMM’s working fleet. SydneyBridgeUpsideDown‘s article on SS Puke was sent to draft space.
Upcoming (plans)
- Do a batch-uploading test for some online collections at NZMM: right now, looking at using Flickr and Flickr2Commons using Flickr Commons.
- Take photos of interior and exterior of NZMM boats Ted Ashby, Nautilus, and SS Puke.
Week 6
Uploaded some images using Flickr2Commons, and did research into using FlickrCommons and WikiCommons as ways to increase accessibility to NZMM collections online. There is potential for images that NZMM uploads to Flickr to then be uploaded to Wiki Commons using tool Flickr2Commons, which was introduced to student by weekly speaker Ferfive.
We determined that batch-uploading would be the most beneficial and began the process of getting tools PattyPan and OpenRefine, open-source programs which can be used for the of uploading multiple images with the corresponding metadata and information.
Week 7
Continued on with our research and editing articles. We also prepared for our Women in Red edit-a-thon hosted at the Auckland Museum.
Week 8
This week we also hosted all the student interns at NZMM, where we had a tour through the library and an excursion on Ted Ashby.
A Flickr account and subsequently a FlickrCommons account was created for NZMM in conjunction with our goals to share and make more accessible collections of NZMM.
Week 9
We took photos of the working fleet and the vessels that we wrote about so that we were not only able to There are now a total of 95 photos in the Wikimedia Commons Category: New Zealand Maritime Museum, about 45 of which were contributed by SydneyBridgeUpsideDown and Goose276. 12 of these 95 photos are images under sub-category Collections of New Zealand Maritime Museum, highlighting the potential and benefits of batch-uploading collection images.
After the photos were uploaded, sub-categories were also created for SS Puke and Nautilius, as these two vessels did not have their own categories unlike Breeze and Ted Ashby.
Here are some photos of the vessels uploaded to WikiCommons
After OpenRefine was downloaded, we were able to begin experimenting with batch-uploads of collections. So far, we’ve identified some out of copyright or CC-BY 4.0 images in the online collection that would be suitable for upload.
Week 10
For our final week of the studentship we presented at the Summer Intern Symposium with a summary of our findings. We have also added more potential topics and articles to an exisiting section Articles to work on with the hope that future Wiki students or Wikipedians interested in the New Zealand Maritime Museum have a starting point. The topics we picked to add were based on topics that we came across during our own research that we felt could warrant creation or further editing.
We are extremely grateful to our supervisors at NZMM and Auckland Museum for their help and guidance during this research.
