Siobhan 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]
Siobhan Leachman | |
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| Nationality | New Zealander |
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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]
Leachman is a lawyer by background and a self-described "stay-at-home mother of two". [2] [3] 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) [4] [5] 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. [6] [7] [8] She moved on to volunteer projects with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, [9] Zooniverse, [10] the Australian Museum, and the New Zealand Virtual Herbarium. [8]
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] [11] She was spending at least two hours a day on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, [12] Wikidata, [13] and iNaturalist, [14] and organised several volunteer events with Wikipedian Mike Dickison. [8] 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] [3] 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] [15]
Leachman has presented at VALA, [16] New Zealand's National Digital Forum, [17] and WikiDataCon. [18] The Smithsonian invited her to be on the "Build the Crowdsourcing Community of Your Dreams" panel at SXSW in 2016. [19] 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. [20] [21] In 2019 at Biodiversity Next in Leiden she spoke about using Bloodhound Tracker (now Bionomia) to link museum specimen data to collectors. [22]
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. [20] In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award. [23]
The Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tāmaki Paenga Hira or 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.
Declana floccosa, the forest semilooper or manuka moth is a moth of the family Geometridae. It is endemic to New Zealand. It was first described by Francis Walker in 1863 using specimens obtained from Colonel Bolton.
GLAM is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and refers to cultural institutions with a mission to provide access to knowledge. GLAMs collect and maintain cultural heritage materials in the public interest. As collecting institutions, GLAMs preserve and make accessible primary sources valuable for researchers.
Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original Galaxy Zoo project and now hosts dozens of projects which allow volunteers to participate in crowdsourced scientific research. It has headquarters at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium. Unlike many early internet-based citizen science projects which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as volunteer computing, Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from disciplines including astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.
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.
Jessica Alice Feinmann Wade is a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy. Her research investigates polymer-based organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). Her public engagement work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) advocates for women in physics as well as tackling systemic biases such as gender and racial bias on Wikipedia.
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 online and human rights activist, free-lance journalist, communications expert and business executive. After successfully helping to prepare RightsCon Tunis, in July 2019, 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 co-founded Carthagina, an initiative designed to create interest in Tunisia's cultural heritage at home and abroad. In August 2019, at the Wikimedia Conference in Stockholm, she was honoured as Wikimedian of the Year 2019 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. 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.
The Auckland Shell Club, also known as the Conchology Section of the Auckland Museum Institute, is a New Zealand society concerned with the study of molluscs and their shells.
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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