A Wikiblitz is a type of Edit-a-thon where volunteer Wikipedia editors tackle one particular task together: improving a single article, fixing a whole category of pages, or uploading a whole photo collection. Complete beginners are welcome; training and troubleshooting is provided.
This edit-a-thon is being hosted by the Auckland Museum, and will focus on adding spectacular photos of specimens from the Land Vertebrates collection to Wikipedia. The Museum has just finished photographing the land vertebrate (bird, mammal, reptile) specimens in its care, and there are many Wikipedia pages lacking a good photo of these species – particularly New Zealand animals.
The Edit-a-thon is free and open to all. You don't need to be an experienced Wikipedia editor to take part.
Auckland Museum has free admission for Aucklanders: if you're coming from out of town, contact Mike at mikegiantflightlessbirds.com or 027 4477081 so he can escort you in.
If you're coming, try to create a Wikipedia accountbeforehand: don't wait until the day to do it! Here's a form you can use if you like. Creating an account makes editing much easier (here's more info on why you should). You'll need to pick a "handle" for your username; you could use your real name, but it's nice to have the option to be a bit anonymous if you want. Here's some advice on picking a username.
Take a look at the Commons category Photos from Auckland Museum, and see the diversity of pictures there. Explore a category that interests you, and check out relevant Wikipedia pages to see if there's as good a photo there; if not, make a note.
If you want to bring photos along and add them to Commons and Wikipedia, they need to be free of any copyright or released under a Creative Commons license that lets anyone use them. If you're not familiar with Creative Commons, see Useful Links below. If you've taken photos and are happy to donate them, great! Bring them along. If you know of anyone who has good photos, approach them and ask them if they'd like their work to be seen and used by people all over the world (with them credited, of course).
User:Hl introduced us to CropTool, very handy for creating cropped images of museum photographs of eggs for use in native bird articles. We also discussed Pattypan and Flickr2Commons.
A gallery of some of the photos attendees worked on:
There will be a newspaper photographer present.
If you don't want your photo in the paper, just choose a red name lanyard; if you don't mind, pick a green one.