Siobhan Leachman | |
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 Leachman in 2022 | |
| Nationality | New Zealander |
| Father | Andrew Leachman |
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Siobhan Leachman is a New Zealand citizen scientist, open knowledge advocate, and Wikimedian whose work focuses on natural history. [1] [2] In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award. She transitioned to citizen science after a career in law, driven by her interest in natural history and archival preservation. [3]
Leachman is a lawyer by background and a self-described "stay-at-home mother of two". [2] [4] Bored after her children began attending kindergarten, [2] she began her volunteer work at the instigation of her twin sister Victoria Leachman (Head of Collections Access at Te Papa) [5] [6] with the Smithsonian Transcription Center, transcribing diaries and field journals such as those of Vernon and Florence Bailey and categorising bumblebee collections of Arthur Wilson Stelfox. [7] [8] [9] She moved on to volunteer projects with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, [10] Zooniverse, [11] the Australian Museum, and the New Zealand Virtual Herbarium. [9]
In 2014 at the encouragement of the Smithsonian Transcription Center she began working on Wikipedia; her first article, on botanist and collector Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis, was quickly flagged for deletion. [2] [12] She was spending at least two hours a day on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, [13] Wikidata, [14] and iNaturalist, [15] and organised several volunteer events with Wikipedian Mike Dickison. [9] Her Wikipedia work focussed on women in science, neglected scientific collectors, and the endemic moths of New Zealand. [2] Inspired by Ahi Pepe Mothnet, her project to create articles on all 1,800 New Zealand endemic moth species draws on openly-licensed images from iNaturalist, the Auckland Museum, and the New Zealand Arthropod Collection. [1] [4] She has been an advocate of open licenses for digital collections of museums and cultural institutions. She has also worked on creating Wikidata entries and Wikipedia articles for female scientific illustrators in the collection of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. [1] [16]
Leachman has presented at VALA, [17] New Zealand's National Digital Forum, [18] and WikiDataCon. [19] The Smithsonian invited her to be on the "Build the Crowdsourcing Community of Your Dreams" panel at SXSW in 2016. [20] In 2018 she was awarded a travel scholarship to present at the WikiCite conference in Berkeley, where she spoke about the difficulties of finding metadata on historical biodiversity literature. [21] [22] In 2019 at Biodiversity Next in Leiden she spoke about using Bloodhound Tracker (now Bionomia) to link museum specimen data to collectors. [23]
In 2019 Auckland Museum made Leachman a Companion of Auckland War Memorial Museum in recognition of her work with their openly-licensed digital collection images. [21] She has contributed to the digitization of their openly licensed collections. In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award. [24]
Leachman actively contributes to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, focusing on topics like New Zealand's natural history and underrepresented figures in science. [3] She has also campaigned to include indigenous knowledge and promote the representation of women in science-related entries. [3]
Leachman is a vocal advocate for citizen science and the importance of open knowledge. Shebfrequently speaks at conferences and workshops, emphasizing the need to close tue gender gap in science representation and ensure the inclusion of indigenous knowledge systems. [25]
The Auckland War Memorial Museum, also known as Auckland Museum, is one of New Zealand's most important museums and war memorials. Its neoclassical building constructed in the 1920s and 1950s, stands on Observatory Hill, the remains of a dormant volcano, in the Auckland Domain, near Auckland CBD. Museum collections concentrate on New Zealand history, natural history, and military history.
Dame Patricia Rose Bergquist was a New Zealand zoologist who specialised in anatomy and taxonomy. At the time of her death, she was professor emerita of zoology and honorary professor of anatomy with radiology at the University of Auckland.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open-access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to address this challenge by digitizing the natural history literature held in their collections and making it freely available for open access as part of a global "biodiversity community". The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, publishers, bioinformaticians, and information technology professionals to develop tools and services to facilitate greater access, interoperability, and reuse of content and data. BHL provides a range of services, data exports, and APIs to allow users to download content, harvest source data files, and reuse materials for research purposes. Through taxonomic intelligence tools developed by Global Names Architecture, BHL indexes the taxonomic names throughout the collection, allowing researchers to locate publications about specific taxa. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, BHL's portal provides free access to hundreds of thousands of volumes, comprising over 59 million pages, from the 15th–21st centuries.
Thomas Frederick Cheeseman was a New Zealand botanist. He was also a naturalist who had wide-ranging interests, such that he even described a few species of sea slugs.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is an institutional archives and library system comprising 21 branch libraries serving the various Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers. The Libraries and Archives serve Smithsonian Institution staff as well as the scholarly community and general public with information and reference support. Its collections number nearly 3 million volumes including 50,000 rare books and manuscripts.
Lucy May Cranwell was a New Zealand botanist responsible for groundbreaking work in palynology. Cranwell was appointed curator of botany at Auckland Museum in 1929, when she was 21 years old. As well as her work on ancient pollen samples she was responsible for encouraging a love of botany in a generation of Auckland children.
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, is able to use under the CC0 public domain license. Wikidata is a wiki powered by the software MediaWiki, including its extension for semi-structured data, the Wikibase. As of mid-2024, Wikidata had 1.57 billion item statements.
A Wikipedian in residence or Wikimedian in residence (WiR) is a Wikipedia editor, a Wikipedian, who accepts a placement with an institution, typically an art gallery, library, archive, museum, cultural institution, learned society, or institute of higher education to facilitate Wikipedia entries related to that institution's mission, encourage and assist it to release material under open licenses, and to develop the relationship between the host institution and the Wikimedia community. A Wikipedian in residence generally helps to coordinate Wikipedia-related outreach events between the GLAM and the general public such as editathons.
Xyridacma alectoraria is a moth of the family Geometridae. It was described by Francis Walker in 1860 using a specimen collected in Auckland. It is endemic to New Zealand. This species is regarded as being rarely observed.
The Wikimedian of the Year is an annual award that honors Wikipedia editors and other contributors to Wikimedia projects to highlight major achievements within the Wikimedia movement, established in August 2011 by Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales. Wales selects the recipients and honors them at Wikimania, an annual conference of the Wikimedia Foundation—except in 2020, 2021, and 2022 when the recipients were announced at online meetings as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2011 to 2016, the award was named Wikipedian of the Year.
Michael R. Dickison is a New Zealand museum curator, zoologist and Wikipedia editor. He was New Zealand's first Wikipedian at Large, in 2018–19, receiving a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Critter of the Week is a weekly RNZ National programme about endangered and neglected native plants and animals of New Zealand.
Wilma M. Blom is a marine scientist. Since 2011 she has been Curator, Marine Invertebrates at Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Emna Mizouni is a Tunisian internet and human rights activist, free-lance journalist, communications expert and business executive. In July 2019, After successfully helping to prepare RightsCon Tunis, Access Now, the international non-profit human rights group intent on an open Internet, announced her appointment to serve in their global board of directors. In March 2013, Mizouni founded Carthagina, an initiative designed to create interest in Tunisia's cultural heritage at home and abroad. In August 2019, she was honoured as Wikimedian of the Year at Wikimania, as a result of the leading role she has played in the development of Arab and African communities as well as her success in promoting the history and culture of Tunisia.
Bionomia is a database and database entry tool which permits the name strings of collectors, and of taxonomists who determine specimen data, to be assigned to the unique person who collected or identified the specimen. If the person is living, this is done via their ORCID iD, and if dead, via their Wikidata identifier. It thereby resolves ambiguity where two or more collectors have similar names; or where one collector has worked under two names, or a single name written in two or more ways. The specimen data associated with, and used by, Bionomia are the aggregated GBIF data.
Sandister Tei is a Ghanaian media professional who was named the Wikimedian of the Year in October 2020 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales during Wikimania 2020. She is the co-founder and an active volunteer of Wikimedia Ghana User Group.
Joan Robb was a New Zealand herpetologist and wildlife tour guide.
Effie Kapsalis was an American open access advocate known for work related to digital programs and initiatives, including those advanced at the Smithsonian Institution.
Robert 'Bob' Evan Mesibov is an American born and educated Australian myriapod specialist. He earned a B.A. from New York University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1971.
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