Mike Dickison

@adzebill

My Jeopardy categories would be Wikipedia, natural history of Aotearoa New Zealand, Sondheim musicals, bird bones, and enough typography to get me into trouble. Ōtautahi, Dr Him. 0000-0003-1183-2550, Q56458901

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Mike Dickison@adzebill· 18d

So we wrote up everything we learned, and it's an actual (small) book now. Tamsin is in Paris at Wikimania with a boxful, handing them out, but you can download the whole thing for free. This was all funded by a small grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Wi...

Cover of Wikifying a Conference by Tamsin Braisher and Mike Dickison

A box of wee orange books about to go on an awfully big adventure.

Interior of the book with Tamsin on modelling duty. Please don't tell me if you see a typo.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 18d

And after that we were Wikimedians at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology, a much bigger event. I used a whiteboard to sketchnote all the work we were doing, and behind it set up a makeshift photography booth, bouncing light off a pull-up banner.

Notes and sketches accumulated over five days of the conference on a whiteboard.

Behind the whiteboard: a cheap LED bank on an even cheaper tripod, and a shiny banner to bounce light off.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 18d

Then Tamsin and I attended the Otago Medical School 150th celebration, and I learned the trick of getting everyone to hold up their name badges, then take them off for the real group photo.

The Otago Medical School Wellington team all showing me their name badge, because who was I anyway and how was I supposed to know their names.

The proper group photo, but now I can actually write a caption with all the names, put Wikidata "depicts" statements for everyone in the metadata, and stick the photo in multiple Commons categories.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 18d

Last year I tried being a Wikipedian at the print festival Printopia—where I discovered how few artists have a website let alone an open-licenced usable image of themselves. As for one posing with some of their art, forget it.

Makyla Curtis in front of some of her art.

A Printopia photo by Tatiana Harper, CC BY-SA 4.0

Printing on a vintage Albion press, which I was able to add to the Wikipedia article.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 18d

Over the last 18 months @thneed.bsky.social and I have been experimenting with being Wikipedians (or Wikimedians) in Residence at conferences—photographing academics, checking they and their papers are in Wikidata, and improving Wikipedia articles related to their research.

Mike and Tamsin with their bestickered laptops at the University of Otago

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 19d

Geraldine seems to be embracing the brave new world of generative AI advertising.

Rock and Roll club flyer generated by software instead of a human designer

Orari River Protection Group flyer generated by software instead of a human designer

Barbershop ad generated by software instead of a human designer

Fundraising ads Rock and Roll club flyer generated by software instead of a human designer, including a somewhat optimistic depiction of cheese rolls.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 23d

Really enjoyed @adamroberts.bsky.social FANTASY: A SHORT HISTORY as an overview of a genre I'd only glimpsed in bits and pieces, with excellent historical context. I did find myself reaching for the dictionary a bit though.

Cover of Roberts's 2025 Fantasy: a Short History, an academic study ranging from Pilgrim's Progress to House of the Dragon.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 27d

The 1992 Act that formed Te Papa justified all this government funding going to Wellington because there would be a national museum service providing support, grants, and training for all the tiny regional museums.

From the Museums Aotearoa site: Te Papa is an autonomous Crown entity that operates under the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992. One of the functions described by the Act is ‘to co-operate with and assist other New Zealand museums in establishing a national service, and in providing appropriate support to other institutions and organisations holding objects or collections of national importance’.

As such, the work of NSTP is funded by the Crown and guided by the Te Papa statement of intent, with the intended outcome that: ‘New Zealand and overseas museums and art galleries benefit from access to support, expertise and collections from Te Papa.’

Our work focuses on providing expertise to the cultural sector, through training opportunities, resources, grants, responding to enquiries and face to face assistance.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· 28d

Arrived in Ōtepoti for the Science Festival. I’ll be staffing the Ask A Wikimedian desk at the Hub (211 George St) all day tomorrow, and giving a public talk on Wikipedia on Friday evening.

Flyer for the NZISF talks, pay what you can afford. Art & Science Panel, Future of Food Panel, and me talking any old nonsense about vandalising Wikipedia—something you Should Not Do (just to head off the BlueSky scolds), but is what we call Dramatic Irony.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jul 13

MOAR BAGELS

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jul 10

Baked Matariki bagels.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jul 10

Anyway, rather than just whinge on BlueSky I wrote them a polite email.

This is peripheral to main point of that podcast, but I did want to take issue a little with your dismissal of science fiction for continuing to embody outdated gender attitudes. Recently as a librarian I curated a SF reading list for our patrons, and it was refreshing to see how well SF authors over the last 20 years have consistently upended gender norms and postulated societies far removed from the patriarchal attitudes that were prevalent in the science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Even 30 years ago John Varley’s writing envisioned a society where gender transition was commonplace, and elicited no more social stigma than changing one’s hairstyle. More recently Ann Leckie’s novels experiment with a dominant culture in which female pronouns are the default, much as male pronouns used to be (link), Mary Robinette Kowal’s very popular novels tell an feminist alternate-history of the space race, and N.K. Jemisen routinely tells stories whose protagonists are queer, female, POC, or all three (and recently also the physical embodiments of cities). These women are not in some backwater labelled “feminist SF”, the way we once referred to the work of Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood. They are all critically acclaimed winners of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, and very much represent mainstream SF for the last decade or two. William Gibson, for all of his feminist sensibilities back in the 1980s, is not especially representative of SF today.

Anyway, just a small point, but it does grieve me to see science fiction run down in this way, when of all human cultural production it’s the genre that most challenges traditional gender roles.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jul 6

Just checked the proofs for the wee book I’ve written with @thneed.bsky.social before it heads off to Wikimania in Paris. It’s a collection of tips on being an event Wikipedian/Wikimedian based on three conferences we were embedded in last year.

Cover of Wikifying a Conference: A Guide for Wikipedians (I will never use orange on a digital press again).

Interior page During the Event with nice champagne shot from a Royal Society prize giving.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jul 4

Really enjoying @raynewman.bsky.social’s third collection of weird, unsettling stories, THIN PLACES IN HARD CONCRETE. I asked @christchurchlib.bsky.social to purchase a copy and they got three!

Cover of Ray Newman’s Thin Places in Hard Concrete—cover designed by him.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 29

This week I'm at the NZ Archaeological Association conference at Takahanga Marae in Kaikōura. No photos allowed of the interior, but take my word for it that Cliff Whiting's creation is stunning.

Three pou and the wharenui of Takahanga Marae.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 25

At #SCANZ26 @bmhayward.bsky.social pointing out NZ has least regulated lobbying frameworks in the whole OECD.

Bronwyn in front of a graph showing NZ down with the Maldives and Moldova.

NZ does not have a regulatory framework or implementing measures for managing risks around lobbying.
NZ does not have a regulatory definition of lobbying or lobbyists, or authority responsible for monitoring lobbying.
NZ has no tools for registering lobbying activities & no system for disclosing/investigating cases of non-compliance.
NZ doesn't have a beneficial ownership regulation for companies identifying their real owners via a public register
(OECD 2026)

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 25

Was just subjected to an AI talk with bad AI graphics, which seems like a slap in the face to all the professional illustrators in the audience. #scanz26

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 24

Anna Yeoman talking about her excellent book n native lizards after winning a #scanz26 award.

Anna Yeoman in person and on the big screen with her book cover.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 20

Today I learned about Oxford Spelling, which uses “organize” and “apologize”. Described by the Times as “volcanic ground, with common usage straining the crust of classical etymology”. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_...

Table showing Oxford spellings of English words, both similar to and very different from US usage.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 20

Anyway I've just done so.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 15

Really enjoyed Anna Yeoman's book on NZ lizards, by far the most approachable introduction. Unlike the three recent and competing field guides, this one is centred on people and conservation stories, and reads like a series of magazine pieces. Stunning photos throughout.

Cover of Geckos and Skinks: The Remarkable Lizards of Aotearoa, a gorgeous Carey Knox photo of a jewelled gecko.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 10

The other day I spent an hour explaining to a council's tourism office that they can’t just rewrite Wikipedia articles to promote local attractions and send people to their website. It was a useful conversation so I blogged about it. www.rove.wiki/blog/your-bo...

A pyramid of sheep at the Agrodome (which was not the attraction, or the council, in question).

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 7

Yes, that's a pretty important one in NZ book world! There must be other notable but closed-down bookshops to add to the list. Currently Wikipedia only has articles on 5 NZ bookstores, and three of those are chains.

Wikipedia's sad listing of NZ bookshops: Borders, Paper Plus, Scorpio, Unity Wellington, and Whitcoulls. Australia has 20-odd.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 7

I've been continuing to upload LiCheng Shih's lovely frog photos to WikiCommons and add them to Wikipedia articles; I leave a thank-you comment in Flickr each time.

A list of Taiwanese frog photos by LiCheng Shih I've upoloaded to Commons and used in Wikipedia articles. Again, I've never met this person and they probably wonder what's going on.

A thank-you comment explaining a photo's now the "official" image of the species in Wikidata and Wikipedia.

A Shih photo in the infobox of the Hylarana latouchii article. For a couple I went through 7–10 of the corresponding articles in non-English langages and added the photo there as well.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 7

The article is looking pretty good now. Was thinking of approaching Booksellers NZ to see if they'd be interested in sponsoring a project to do this with all the indie booksellers in NZ. Anyone interested in some Wikipedia volunteering? Or work in an indie bookshop that'd be keen to be involved?

Scorpio Books article in Wikipedia, now B class, which is pretty reasonable.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 4

That expert is Michael Whitbrock and he says a great example of AI integration is the transcription of doctors’ appointments. I guess he hasn’t read the Canadian Auditor General report which found AI transcripts were full of mistakes and outright hallucinations.

But University of Auckland Al expert Dr Michael Witbrock thinks Al uptake can still be high in certain fields. The widespread use of Al notetakers in GPs' offices, for example, is evidence of "relatively high trust amongst people who have looked into the utility of this".

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 3

Really enjoyed @adambecker.bsky.social’s MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER: absolutely punishing AGI, Engineer’s Disease, Mars colonies, Peter Thiel, the very idea of billionaires, Effective Altruism, and various other manifestations of this strange time, all from a journalist trained in astrophysics.

Cover of Adam Becker’s MORE
EVERYTHING FOREVER, promising to cover AI OVERLORDS, SPACE EMPIRES, AND SILICON VALLEY'S CRUSADE TO CONTROL THE FATE OF HUMANITY which it does.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 1

I spent two minutes checking my feed. These are all copyright violations under NZ law: not fair dealing (criticism or review and research or private study), and NZ doesn’t have “fair use”. If we ever decided to enforce the law, a bot could demand they be taken down. This already happens in YouTube.

An Eve Arnold photo (died 2012, so copyrighted in NZ until 2062, soon 2082)

Screenshot of an Elon Musk news story, not a link (copyrighted text and layout and photos)

Photo of a funny T-shirt (copyrighted) which repurposes a Richard Scarry picture, so the shirt itself might be a copyright violation unless they licensed it, who can say. And maybe the photo wasn’t taken by the poster? A third layer of © violation if so.

A Discworld Quote of the Day—it’s possible that Micah has negotiated a licence with both Terry Pratchett’s estate and with his publisher (to reproduce the typographic layout) for each quote. Please correct me if this is so.

Mike Dickison@adzebill· Jun 1

Current NZ term: www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1...

Copyright Act 1994
23 Duration of copyright in sound recordings and films
(1)
Copyright in a sound recording or film expires
(2)
(a)
at the end of the period of 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the work is made; or
(b)
if it is made available to the public by an authorised act before the end of that period, 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which it is so made available,—
whichever is the later.
For the purposes of subsection (1), a sound recording or film is made available to the public
when-(a)
the work is first (i)
published; or
(ii)
communicated to the public; or
(b)
in the case of a film or film soundtrack,
(i)
the work is first shown in public;
Or
(ii)
the work is first played in pul

Mike Dickison@adzebill· May 26

However we can still read the work in Project Gutenberg (see page 18 and footnote for the Dracula references): www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68612