Archaeology Aotearoa Wikimedia project

CAP is working with Wikipedia consultant Dr Mike Dickison to improve the coverage of New Zealand’s archaeology and archaeologists in Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Hosted by Underground Overground Archaeology one day a week for the first half of 2026, Mike will be assessing the quality of archaeology coverage in Wikipedia and recruiting volunteer Wikipedia editors to help improve or create articles. He will also be helping release photos of people, sites, excavations, and objects under an open licence so they can illustrate Wikipedia articles; making publications more available via the database Wikidata; linking some archaeologist profiles to their publications so they’re easier to cite in Wikipedia; and help any archaeologists who are interested engage better with the Wiki projects.

“Wikipedia appears near the top of any Google search and is heavily scraped by AI, so it acts as the public face of New Zealand archaeology to students, stakeholders, journalists, and politicians—which means we should take it seriously,” says Mike.

The project is funded by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, in turn funded by public donations to Wikipedia. You can read more about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Archaeology_Aotearoa or https://w.wiki/HjaL