Siobhan Leachman Explained

Siobhan Leachman
Nationality:New Zealander

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.

Life and career

Leachman is a lawyer by background and a self-described "stay-at-home mother of two".[3] Bored after her children began attending kindergarten, 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.[11]

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.[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. Her Wikipedia work focussed on women in science, neglected scientific collectors, and the endemic moths of New Zealand. 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. 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.[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] 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.[23] In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award.[24]

Selected works

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: D'Alterio. Emily. March 18, 2019. Women in culture and tech: Siobhan Leachman, Citizen scientist and wikimedian. 2020-06-25. Europeana Pro. en-GB.
  2. Web site: Macdonald. Nikki. 9 November 2018. How it is decided who is Wikipedia-worthy. 25 June 2020. Stuff.
  3. Web site: Mulligan. Jesse. 22 November 2018. Sharing Kiwi biodiversity online. 27 June 2020. RNZ.
  4. News: Crow. Kelly. 2014-09-11. The Smithsonian Works to Digitize Millions of Documents. en-US. Wall Street Journal. 2021-07-17. 0099-9660.
  5. Web site: Victoria Leachman's schedule for NDF2018. 2021-07-17. ndf2018.sched.com.
  6. Web site: 17 October 2014. Online Amateurs Feed Their Science and History Addictions. 2020-06-25. NBC News. en.
  7. News: Crow. Kelly. 2014-09-11. The Smithsonian Works to Digitize Millions of Documents. en-US. Wall Street Journal. 2020-06-25.
  8. Arnold. Naomi. July–August 2016. Natural History 2.0. New Zealand Geographic. 140.
  9. Web site: Siobhan Leachman. Biodiversity Heritage Library blog.
  10. Web site: Siobhan Leachman. 2020-06-28. Zooniverse.
  11. Arnold. Naomi. July–August 2016. Natural History 2.0. New Zealand Geographic. 140.
  12. Web site: Ambrosia10 – Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org) – Edit Counter – XTools.
  13. Web site: Ambrosia10 – Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org) – Edit Counter – XTools.
  14. Web site: Siobhan Leachman. www.wikidata.org.
  15. Web site: Siobhan Leachman's Profile. 2020-06-28. iNaturalist NZ. en.
  16. Web site: Leachman. Siobhan. 23 May 2017. The Serendipitous Discovery of Susan Fereday: A Story about the Impact of Citizen Science. 2020-06-28. Biodiversity Heritage Library. en-US.
  17. Web site: VALA2020 Plenary 4 Leachman. 10 December 2019.
  18. Web site: Butler. Nick. 21 January 2020. Copyright for digital GLAMs: Lessons from NDF2019. 2020-06-26. Boost. en.
  19. Web site: WikidataCon 2019 Program. Wikidata.
  20. Web site: Build the Crowdsourcing Community of Your Dreams SXSW 2016 Event Schedule. 2020-06-26. SXSW Schedule 2016.
  21. Web site: Leachman. Siobhan. Shaw. Diane. Mika. Katherine. 31 January 2019. BHL and WikiCite 2018. 2020-06-28. Biodiversity Heritage Library. en-US.
  22. Web site: Page. Roderic. 5 November 2019. Thoughts on Biodiversity Next. iPhylo. 2051-8188.
  23. Web site: Auckland Museum. 1 March 2019. Museum Medals Honour Outstanding Individuals. Scoop News.
  24. Web site: Foundation . Wikimedia . 2023-08-16 . Celebrating the 2023 Wikimedian of the Year Winners . 2023-08-16 . Diff . en-US.

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