Wikipedia:Meetup/Wellington
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Upcoming meetup 14 March 2026
- Date: 14 March 2026
- Time: 10:00 am to midday
- Location: Te Kupenga room, one floor up from reception - just off the first floor landing of National Library, corner Molesworth and Aitken Streets, Wellington
- Bring a laptop if you have one. There are publicly available computers if you don't have a laptop, but they are located elsewhere in the library.

Wikipedians in Wellington Meetups
Wikipedians in Wellington hold regular, in person, informal meetups. At the meetup we usually have some experienced users available to provide advice with joining the Wikipedia platforms, learning editing and uploading new content to Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons, and generally improving skills.
This is an informal and social meetup where the goal is to be accessible and friendly to all and to talk about what you are doing or want to do. Ask questions, get some help, or just get editing. The group is committed to providing a safe space. Children are welcome. When we meet in person we aim to meet at disabled-accessible locations that have free wifi, are near a public transport hub, and ideally have publicly accessible computer equipment.
Newbies Complete beginners are welcome. If you want to meet up with a friendly wikipedian before the meetup please contact admin @ wikimedia.nz and Dianne will put you in touch with someone who can help. This is something we are putting in place because we know it can be a bit off putting to walk into a meeting by yourself. A one-on-one meeting with an editor that regularly attends this meeting will mean you'll already have someone you know at the meeting. Alternatively do just pop along. If you are a complete beginner and you need some help on how to sign up and set up your account on Wikipedia before you get to the meetup, check out the first five minutes of this YouTube video. If you want to find out more about the meetup before attending check out the agenda for the next meet up page or leave messages on the talk pages of the Meet Up coordinators Einebillion (talk) or Ambrosia10 (talk) and we'll be happy to chat with you and answer your questions.
The main focus of the meeting is to update each other on what attendees have been working on, demonstrate helpful tools and workflows, and a focus on solving the issues attendees were having. The group is very welcoming to new editors and those interested in watching before diving into to editing or adding to any of the Wikiverse platforms.
- WGTN3 meetup at Loretta
- WGTN4 meetup at Scopa
- Meetup at He Matapihi Molesworth Library.
- Online meetup during Alert Level 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020
Meetup Code of Conduct and Anonymity if Meeting Via Video Conference
All attendees of the Wellington Wiki meetup, in whatever form the meeting is held, are expected to understand and abide by Wikimedia's Universal Code of Conduct.
Should video conferencing meetups replace in-person meetings for any reason, the following has been agreed by regular meeting attendees. While attending and remaining anonymous is supported by the group, lurking is not supported and will be actively discouraged. All attendees are expected to use their User name as an identifier on the video conference call and to introduce themselves and their interest in joining the call on the chat channel of the call as a minimum. Participation using video and / or voice in addition to Chat is encouraged but not required.
Some members of the group have been the target of cyber bullying in the past and these measures are intended to support creating a safe space for collaboration.
If a new attendee joins the group with video and voice disabled, they will be encouraged to participate by the facilitator, using this script:
- Welcome new attendee. This group respects your right to remain anonymous. This group has a policy of discouraging lurking as it makes some of us uncomfortable. If you are happy to introduce yourself over voice, please let us know what you've been working on and if you need help with any editing issues.
- If you're not comfortable updating the group by voice, then that's okay. You have the option of introducing yourself and adding your user page link into the chat feature. The chat is deleted once the video conference finishes.
- If you want to remain completely anonymous and not chat, then this meetup is not for you. We make comprehensive and extensive notes of the meetup that will be included in the meetup page afterwards. That's the best way to catch up with what this meetup has been doing if you don't want to contribute during the video call.
- If you're not sure how to use the chat feature you can access it by clicking on the icon that looks like a speech bubble in the bottom left corner.
If, after an appropriate length of time, the new attendee does not participate by video, voice, or chat, the facilitator of the group will remove the attendee from the video call.
If the new attendee persists in logging in, the group will discuss abandoning the meet up.
Training aids and Resources
Wikipedia
- The main English Wikipedia Help page is here. It has links on how to edit a page, contributing to Wikipedia, an introductory tutorial, and "getting started"
- A useful introductory video on editing: YouTube video – How to Edit Wikipedia – a 2018 tutorial (47:44)
- This includes
- How to create and set up your account (00:00)
- Looking at an example page (04:07) including the Talk page (10:50) and View History (11:25)
- Drafting an article and using your Sandbox (13:00) including having a minimum of 50 to 100 words with three high quality, reliable, secondary sources (13:50), drafting content and editing tools in visual editor (16:25), adding citations (19:02), adding images from Wikimedia Commons (26:10), adding an info box (28:24), categories (30:35)
- Your own talk page (33:25) including adding a new editor badge
- Moving drafted content to Wikipedia's livespace (39:23)
- A timelapse of drafting and publishing a new article on Wikipedia (44:23)
- This includes
- A shorter (20 min) introduction video on editing: YouTube video - Wikipedia Training in 20 minutes - April 2022 (22:29)
- Learn to edit Wikipedia in under an hour!
- Tools
- Template:Article templates - templates for common types of articles
- The Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) tool predicts the quality of a wikipedia article and adds a indicator to each wikipedia page you view.[1] It is a way of monitoring the quality of the Wikipedia articles you are starting and editing. To install this tool add the following line to your Special:MyPage/common.js page. Adding this little snippet of code enables the display the ORES article quality score and class (stub, start, C, B, etc.) at the top of each Wikipedia article you view. Add this line of code:
- importScript("User:EpochFail/ArticleQuality-loader.js");
- Wiki statistics
Wikidata

Here are a number of useful introductory videos on Wikidata and why it's great. They are ranked by complexity and depth of information.
- YouTube video – Wikidata and Why You Should Care. (7 min 37 sec)
- YouTube video – How to manually edit Wikidata. (2 min 15 sec)
- YouTube video – An Introduction to Wikidata. (22 min 34 sec) and the slide deck from this presentation.
- YouTube video – A Gentle Introduction to Wikidata for Absolute Beginners [including non-techies! (3 hrs 4 min 32 sec)
- This last video is three hours long so use these time markers to skip to the sections you are interested in.
- What is Wikidata? (00:00)
- How to contribute new data to Wikidata (1:09:34)
- How to create an entirely new item on Wikidata (1:27:07)
- How to embed Wikidata into pages on other wikis (1:52:54)
- Tools like the Wikidata Game (1:39:20)
- Article Placeholder (2:01:01)
- Reasonator (2:54:15)
- Mix'n'Match (2:57:05)
- How to Query Wikidata (including SPARQL examples) (2:05:05)
- This last video is three hours long so use these time markers to skip to the sections you are interested in.
Videos and other content useful for experienced editors of Wikidata
- Mass edits on Wikidata – how to use Google spreadsheets and Quickstatements (9:42)
- Asaf Bartov's Beyond the Basics presentation to New Zealand wikidata editors
- Open Refine for beginners
- The Wikibook on SPARQL helps with learning how to query Wikidata via the Wikidata Query Service.
Videos on Wikidata gadgets
Wikidata Tools
Toolforge
Software tools, including scripts and bots related to maintaining WMF projects, can be hosted on the Wikimedia Toolforge servers. Additional help for developers may be found at wikitech:Help:Toolforge. A complete listing of tools can be found at Toolforge:admin/tools, and a more detailed list of some of them at toolforge:hay/directory. see also https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Toolforge_tools
List of Wikipedia Weekly Youtube episodes featuring different tools & workflows

Mix'n'Match
Here's a useful video demonstrating how to use the Mix'n'Match tool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE9ZvwYCNnQ&t=446s
To make all the other possible mix'n'match authority control id suggestions appear at the top of a Wikidata record
- Go to your Wikidata common.js page for example https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:[insert your user name and remove the square brackets]/common.js and add the code
importScript( 'User:Magnus_Manske/mixnmatch_gadget.js' );
- then Save.
- Then refresh the page or clear the cache of your browser.
The Wikidata Game
TABernacle
Quick statements
Cradle
Tool to create items following certain templates
Open Refine
- Add column based on wikidata https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/OpenRefine#/media/File:GIF_screencast_of_data_extension_on_OpenRefine_with_Wikidata.gif
- Compare columns - two suggested ways https://kb.refinepro.com/2011/07/compare-two-value-in-two-column.html
- Backing up or accessing your projects - see this GitHub page Quilt Phase (talk) 03:42, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
- Illinois Library LibGuide for OpenRefine 3.3 https://guides.library.illinois.edu/openrefine/home
- Useful recipes for achieving certain tasks in OpenRefine https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Recipes
- Avoiding making duplicate statements by laundering OpenRefine output through Quick Statements before uploading to Wikidata. Also includes how to extract a URL from hyperlinked text in Excel using a macro Google doc DrThneed (talk) 01:19, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
- making new wikidata items via OpenRefine https://addshore.com/2020/07/creating-new-wikidata-items-with-openrefine-and-quickstatements/
- Extract the Wikidata Q-values from reconciled items: Edit column --> Add column based on this column" and then using the GREL expression "cell.recon.match.id" to retrieve the Q-numbers https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/issues/1975
- Einebillion's manual / how tos User:Einebillion/Manual
- Youtube video on how to take data from OpenRefine to Wikidata through QuickStatements
Tool to help add depicts wikidata statements to images see Youtube video
Wikimedia Commons

- YouTube Video – Adding Images to Wikimedia Commons (4:17)
- YouTube Video – Learn about Wikimedia Commons (16:26)
- YouTube Video – Creative Commons copyright licensing explained (5:32)
- Interactive Release Generator
- Tool to help add depicts wikidata statements to images see Youtube video
Ninja tips, useful shortcuts etc.
- For articles about people with post-nominals (ONZM, QC etc.) there is a Template:post-nominals. For instance, Sir John Buck CNZM OBE is produced with
{{post-nominals|CNZM|OBE|country=NZL}} - Wikidata properties for works
- If you enjoy improving the writing in articles, join the Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors. There's a newsletter, IRC chatroom and a nifty copy-edit template to send in the cavalry: just add
{{copy-edit}}to the top of the article. - For maps and using Open Street Map data use the {{mapframe}} template. For a map in an infobox for towns, locations, buildings and the like (any infobox that has a
mapparameter), use the special {{infobox mapframe}} template. At their simplest, they take acoordparameter (use the {{coord}} template for the value), and azoomparameter, which you can tweak to suit. For instance, the infobox in the article for the Harbour View suburb of Lower Hutt contains the following:
map = {{infobox mapframe | coord = {{coord|41|12|07|S|174|53|56|E}} | zoom = 14}}
- These two templates and their various siblings are very powerful - it's worth reading their documentation for more advanced use. For instance, instead of guessing an arbitrary zoom number, you can instead specify the object's size with
length_kmorarea_km2and it will figure it out for you. Instead of coordinates, you can specify a Wikidata item withid, as long as it has geodata properties (coordinates, geoshape, or OSM relation). For an example, see Transmission Gully Motorway.
Wellington Meetup Highlighted Resources
- Library Carpentry, course information on tidying up messy data and has information on how to work with wikidata
- Canterbury Stories, a digital repository.
- LINZ digitised Surveyor Field books – 675,000 page images from the 1840s up to 1970s, released as CC BY
- Figure New Zealand – data visualisation for New Zealand and We are here book – data visualisation in New Zealand
- Photographers’ Identities Catalog
- Culture Waitaki for heritage images with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 copyright licensed images and Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa New Zealand Digitised Year Books 1893 – 2012
- Tool made by User:Magnus_Manske to help add depicts wikidata statements to images see Youtube video
- Europeana Collections, Hawke's Bay Digital Archives Trust
- Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Digital NZ
- Gazette for New Zealand (1946 ~ 1992)
- NZ Research Hub for peer-reviewed and other research from universities
- Archives NZ catalogue
- Whites Aviation Collection
Group Admin Notes
- Marketing info on google doc
