User:Giantflightlessbirds/Chch Archaeology

This is a draft of a possible Wikimedia collaboration between Mike Dickison (Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large 2025) and the Christchurch Archaeology Project (CAP), who maintain the online database the Museum of Archaeology Ōtautahi (MoAŌ). This proposal looks at possible Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia contributions that could be made to better tell the story of the archaeology of Ōtautahi Christchurch and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Wikidata

• Museum of Archaeology people now in Wikidata: Hayden Cawte (Q131176672). Jessie Garland (Q110210563), and Katharine Watson (Q125119626). None of these archaeologists have a public ORCID record yet, and the items could all be improved with more biographical information.
• Wikidata still needed for the Christchurch Archaeology Project, the Museum of Archaeology Ōtautahi, and Underground Overground Archaeology (UOArch)

• The forthcoming paper by Katharine Watson could be fully created as a Wikidata item as an example, with all cited references, collaborators, subjects included.

Commons

• Category:Museum of Archaeology Ōtautahi created.

• 
• 
  Jessie Garland
• 
  Hayden Cawte
• 
  Katharine Watson

• Photos from the substantial CAP collection could be added to Commons where copyright can be cleared; this will require negotiating with clients like the CCC, Christ's College, the Arts Centre, and CERA's successor. The Wikipedian can organise bulk release of photos under an open licence.
• The Wikipedian and the archaeologists have already met to discuss creating a copyright and open licensing policy for CAP and the MoAŌ.
• Many Wikipedia articles could have photos added depicting on-site archaeology: Linwood House, the Hotel Grand Chancellor, Mona Vale, Isaac Theatre Royal, Lyttleton Timeball Station, Knox Church and dozens of others.
• CAP photos could be used to illustrate:
  • pottery articles like transfer printing, Copeland, Davenport, Wedgwood, and Staffordshire Potteries
  • articles about people like Joseph Brittan
  • organisations like the Christchurch Club, the Canterbury Club, Ballantynes, and Christchurch's second Jewish Synagogue
  • products like Crosse & Blackwell and Heinz
• The cumulative unique views of these articles will be substantial. Even the Heinz article (1000 readers a day) could have a CAP photo of Heinz Stuffed Olives added.

Wikipedia

The subject expertise and contacts of the CAP team could be used to substantially improve:

• Archaeology of New Zealand
• Christchurch, especially sections on the History of Christchurch (for example, the now-buried tram system) and articles relating to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and subsequent archaeological work
• Historical archaeology, which is a Start-class article citing almost no sources

Collaboration

1. This project would need to reach out to the volunteer collaborative endeavor WikiProject Archaeology, and make us of its network of editors and its expertise.
2. The editor community in Christchurch, which is currently having monthly meetups and events, could be approached to run a community all-day editing project—an "edit-a-thon"—to work with archaeologists and publications to improve specific Wikipedia articles.
3. Part of this project would also involve connecting with archaeologists, universities, ICOMOS Aotearoa NZ, and Heritage NZ Pouhere Taonga. The goal would be teaching heritage professionals, archeologists and archaeology students about Wikipedia, Commons, and copyright, encouraging them to support the project and even improve Wikipedia themselves.

Resources

• Archaeopedia is a New Zealand archaeology resource site, run on the Mediawiki platform and created by Simon Bickler and Garry Law, with contributions by Scott Pilkington and Jennifer Low, although only Law seems to have made any edits to it in the last few years. It has a substantial number of articles but does not thoroughly cite its sources so would not qualify as a reliable source for Wikipedia articles. It would be great to harness energy like this to improve Wikipedia instead.

The following were identified as key works on NZ archaeology by the CAP team; none of them are cited in the article on archaeology of New Zealand.

• Furey, Louise and Simon Holdaway (eds.) (2004). Change Through Time: 50 years of New Zealand archaeology. Monograph 26, New Zealand Archaeological Association
• Campbell, Matthew, Simon Holdaway & Sarah Macready (eds.) (2013) Finding Our Recent Past: historical archaeology in New Zealand. Monograph 29, New Zealand Archaeological Association
• Smith, Ian. (2019). Pākehā Settlements in a Māori World: New Zealand Archaeology 1769–1860. Bridget Williams Books: Wellington
• Davidson, Janet (1987). Prehistory of New Zealand. Longman Paul.