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. She transitioned to citizen science after a career in law, driven by her interest in natural history and archival preservation.[3]
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.[2][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.[9] Her Wikipedia work focussed on women in science, neglected scientific collectors, and the endemic moths of New Zealand.[2] 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.[1][4] 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.[1][16]
Leachman presenting on her project to describe New Zealand endemic moths at WikiCite 2018
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][22] In 2019 at Biodiversity Next in Leiden she spoke about using Bloodhound Tracker (now Bionomia) to link museum specimen data to collectors.[23]
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.[21] She has contributed to the digitization of their openly licensed collections. In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award.[24]
Leachman actively contributes to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, focusing on topics like New Zealand's natural history and underrepresented figures in science. [3] She has also campaigned to include indigenous knowledge and promote the representation of women in science-related entries. [3]
Advocacy and Impact
Leachman is a vocal advocate for citizen science and the importance of open knowledge. Shebfrequently speaks at conferences and workshops, emphasizing the need to close tue gender gap in science representation and ensure the inclusion of indigenous knowledge systems.[25]
.jpg)
