WikiCon takes place at Ara 

_{WikiCon2025 delegates at Te Puna Wānaka}

When Wikipedia content creators (Wikimedians) get together it seems only natural they’d even create their own conference content.

That’s exactly what happened when WikiCon25, organised by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand (WANZ - an affiliate of the international Wikimedia Foundation), was held for the first time in Ōtautahi at the weekend.

The event at Te Puna Wānaka (TPW) on the Ara Institute of Canterbury campus was the largest gathering of Wikimedians in New Zealand ever.

Ara’s School of English Manager Heather Knox, a founding committee member of WANZ, said the conference allowed contributors to connect face-to-face and forge collaborative relationships. She said the warm welcome provided by Stanley Tawa and the learning spaces of the Te Puna Wānaka building added hugely to the event.

“What I also loved about 2025 was how the programme was uniquely constructed by the participants,” she said.

“When we invited people to register, we sent out a list of questions asking what they wanted to get out of the conference. After we gathered a list of topics, we went back to the delegates and invited them to facilitate different elements.”

They landed on a range of workshops and presentations on subjects ranging from copyright and finding reliable sources to modelling iwi, hapū, and rūnanga correctly, and discussing how Wikipedia deals with disinformation and how to attract younger contributors.

Wikipedia is one of the top visited websites in the world and is maintained by around 120,000 volunteer editors across the globe.

A few hundred regular editors around New Zealand are committed to reviewing, improving and creating content, correcting typos, updating facts, and monitoring vandalism - all in the name of making knowledge freely available for everyone.

Knox, an editor for several years, is one of four Ara staff who are regular contributors to Wikipedia and its related projects including Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikisource.

She often catches up with colleagues to talk about content and share tips and ideas. All share a passion for the self-regulating resource.

Knox says Wikipedia aspires to be the sum total of all human knowledge - all things that humans know in all parts of the world over all time. The concept is that anyone can jump on to do edits and they tend to get “hooked” when they notice gaps in the coverage of topics they are passionate about.

“For me that was coverage of women in New Zealand history,” Knox said. “I was reading a piece on Ethel Benjamin and felt it lacked detail considering her impact on our history as New Zealand’s first woman to study and practice law. I wanted to add to it – and that’s what started me off.”

Since then, Knox has written just over 1,000 articles: sometimes at the rate of three a night, sometimes she might go weeks without publishing.

She hopes that the range of ideas and technical skills shared at WikiCon 2025 will encourage others from diverse backgrounds to find their own niche on the free online encyclopaedia.

Footnote: WANZ supports people and organisations to improve and increase contributions to Wikipedia and its related projects through events, training and partnerships. Learn more here: https://www.wikimedia.nz/