Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand 2023 - 2026/Yearly Report (2024)
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Part 1: Understanding your work
[edit]Per the recent update on the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy process, Wikimedia Affiliates that are General Support Fund grantees will fulfill their affiliate reporting requirements through their final or yearly grantee report.
If you are a Wikimedia Affiliate, you will use this form for your affiliate reporting and to address the affiliate health criteria. You do not need to submit a separate report to AffCom. Follow the guidance in the green boxes to report on how you met the corresponding affiliate health criteria.
If you are not a Wikimedia Affiliate, aligning your responses with the affiliate criteria is optional and not required.
1. Please share to what extent your programs, approaches, and strategies contributed to addressing the challenges you shared in your proposal. If they did not contribute as you believed they would, please share what obstacles you faced and what, if anything, you learned from them? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 1.) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 1.1 (Goal delivery). Describe how you actively delivered on mission goals, e.g. content creation.
Our strategic goals are (1) ensure we are an effectively organised and high performing affiliate, (2) to develop and diversify our editor base, (3) to build on our partnerships, (4) to increase our membership diversity, (5) develop events and projects to fill gaps in Aotearoa New Zealand information and (6) to promote and raise our profile and the work of the foundation. This report is year two of our first three year funding received from the Foundation. We have built on our first year achieving most of what we set out to do. We are effectively organised and high performing in our results. Promoting our organisation and raising our profile has been particularly successful with the employment of a marketing and communications coordinator. Having two paid staff on the team helps to address one of the main challenges we have faced, which is burn out by our board members, key editors and organisers, who have been, and continue to be, very generous with their volunteer time.
To help achieve Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand (WANZ) first strategic goal “that we are an effectively organised and high-performing affiliate” we applied for, and were successful in achieving Chapter status as an affiliate. The range of communications and communication channels promoting this exciting news has already improved our profile and increased our following on many platforms. We see this as an important step for expanding our base. The perseverance and hard work of our board and team was the backbone of this success.
To cement good governance practices, we set up a shared filing and workspace (using Google Workspace) to manage our documentation and make collaboration between the WANZ committee/board and staff easier. Dedicated Wikimedia email addresses ensure we keep good records of all of our communications, which assists us with good governance and a Google Workspace for all of our documents works well alongside BoardPro, our governance software. We use Board and Committee interchangeably in this document.
It took a long time to replace people for the WANZ Board. The strategy that worked was our president reaching out personally to members, partners and contacts. We understand that committee work must be a pleasant experience, that is not too onerous, in order to attract and keep our volunteer Board members. We are now actively talking about this, and seeking feedback, to attract the right skills for our Board and to safeguard WANZ in the future. Board membership is confirmed at our Annual General Meeting with a members vote.
One of our main efforts the past year has been getting our message out to people and organisations. In 2024/2025 we took a number of steps to assist in this area, including publishing a monthly newsletter from August 2024. In November 2024 we recruited a marketing and communications coordinator who has greatly assisted us with communicating to potential members, organisations and partners, as well as to our current members, editors and organisers. We have developed and cemented our social media presence across several platforms, improved our newsletter content and extended our reach and we have established good relationships with mainstream media reporters. When our Chapter status was published, mainstream media reporters reached out to us for a story, which confirmed the relationship building that has happened since our communications person came on board. We also provided media training to our committee at our business planning day, discussing key messaging to draw on as needed.
We are close to completing our Communications Policy and Communications Strategy to guide us in our strategic and operational approaches to issues as they arise. This is now even more important, with our new Chapter status, to ensure we comply with the conditions in our Chapter Agreement.
Policy development is progressing but slowly, because of limited volunteer capacity on our committee. We are currently looking at ways to improve our approach. We tried a “workstream lead” approach but this had limited success. One of the ideas to trial now is the use of sub-committees, which currently works well for our committee in the areas of finance and for membership applications. The committee is now delegating work to the paid staff more effectively, who work alongside our volunteer committee which is also speeding things up and helping to get work over the line.
WANZ now has two part-time paid contractors which has eased the setting up, organising and running of events and taken pressure off the WANZ committee and members for organising meetups, projects, our annual conference and edit-a-thons. Organisers and editors are now able to call on us for everything they need to hold a successful event. We deliver equipment and promotional tools throughout our cities as requested.
We seek to expand our base of active editors and organisers and we consider training to be part of this. We currently use Australia online training sessions, and plan to curate training modules for new editors and organisers, and put in place systems to reach out to new editors with offers of support and training. Our very active editing community continue to offer their time generously to run and attend events and they are training new editors.
We have been successful in retaining and growing members from the previous financial year. We now have 50 members, and on a per-capita basis this is a strong level of support compared with many other English-speaking countries. Fifty members represents around 12% of the 410 editors that Wikistats reports as being active in New Zealand (with 5 to 99 edits per month), and 70% of the 70 editors that Wikistats reports as being active in New Zealand (with >100 edits per month). We will continue to seek to grow our membership, and a focus of ours will be to move towards targeted recruitment of experienced editors who are not yet members. We will review the membership strategy within the next month.
We have successfully maintained our key partnerships with Auckland Museum and Te Papa The National Museum of New Zealand, our two largest museums, with the aim of developing more editors, and especially younger editors from their summer internships. Over the past year we have developed relationships with two of our seven universities - Victoria University in Wellington, and Otago University in Dunedin. At Victoria University, three people on our committee were invited to present to a lecturers group (VicTeach) about our work and the Wikipedia movement. We have recently partnered with Otago University in Dunedin to fund a Wikipedian in Residence.
Local and regional events attended and organised by WANZ and members included the ESEAP, Strategy Summit, monthly in-person meetups in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, and a monthly online meetup for New Zealand editors (some Australian editors also participate). Several edit-a-thons were also organised, including NZ Species, Women and Architecture, and Research expeditions with Te Papa. These events helped recruit new editors, and broaden the range of people who may become involved in organising and running our events, thus increasing our overall capability.
We continue to develop partnerships with some key national organisations, particularly in the GLAM sector. This has included the National Digital Form (a major GLAM sector conference), and LIANZA (the umbrella group for New Zealand librarians). We are currently reaching out to Parliament Library and National Archives to identify projects that may be mutually beneficial.
Increasing the involvement of Māori, Pacific people, and under-represented groups continues to be a goal, although there has not been a change that we can record. We have provided Te Tiriti training for our committee and staff. The training enables a common understanding about the history of New Zealand centered around the partnership agreements that were made between the colonial government of England and the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand which were various Māori Iwi (Maori tribes or nations). We do not currently collect diversity data for events we fund and we are talking about the best way to approach this.
There has been a range of individual efforts by the WANZ committee, and paid members, to connect with Māori communities and it is identified a more cohesive effort is needed. Barriers include different priorities within Māori communities. We understand building relationships takes time and know that some relationships have been started.
WANZ has developed a scoping paper and we have a facilitated session organised at our next annual Strategy weekend coming up at the end of July with the focus on developing an appropriate strategy to engage with Maori to progress our strategy initiatives. The facilitation is provided by Māori specialist Wikaira Consulting. The committee will come away with clear actions to take to improve our relationships with Maori communities.
Project gaps that have been funded by WANZ include the ongoing NZ Species edit-a-thons and Women+Architecture edit-a-thons and walking tours. We have found that the thematic approach to edit-a-thons gets more people interested in attending our events.
Our Wikipedian at Large, now based in our second largest city, and our Wikipedian in Residence at Auckland University have been reasons for our success. Both are active editors and organisers with energy and strong skills that they enjoy sharing with the community.
2. Is there a plan to build on the key successes you had? If yes, please describe the plan and if no, please share the limitations to do so. For instance, did the activities lead to any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future? (required)
One of our key successes has been the recent increase in young people in our movement. Our Wikipedian in Residence (WiR) at Auckland Museum is responsible for mentoring summer student interns. The success of this programme has included students attending and presenting at national and international Wikimedia events. This has opened up dialogue with students and our committee. Understanding the importance of thematic approaches to edit-a-thons for instance, to draw interest from younger people. This is a programme that we will continue to support, and we have already approved funding for the WiR role for another year from September 2025. The WiR project at University of Otago is another initiative with a focus on engagement with younger people in the education sector.
We recruited two summer students onto our committee, offering the opportunity for these students to develop new skills and learn about governance, while contributing to our work across New Zealand at a more strategic level. This is an initiative we will continue, offering opportunities for young people to be involved in our work.
Our annual WikiCon held in Christchurch in May 2025 was the largest gathering of Wikipedians in New Zealand to date. Scholarship funding assisted attendees with travel costs and boosted attendance. Other important factors contributing to the success were, early project management and communications from one year out, with a confirmed city, conference venue and dates. We had two active Wikipedians on the organising committee (both former committee members, including our Wikipedian at Large) working with our Executive Advisor and our Communications Coordinator. This worked well, with the paid team being able to reduce the amount of time required by our volunteers. We will build on this approach for our next Wikicon in 2026 to be held in our capital city Wellington.
Developing leaders and organisers will become more of a priority to enable expansion of our work. Amongst our current members, there is a group of active editors who give a lot of their time to organising and running edit-a-thons and other projects, supporting our work as the Wikipedian at Large, or Wikipedians in Residence (WiR), presenting work locally, regionally and internationally and generously giving time and energy to the wiki movement. However, there are many editors in the Aotearoa New Zealand community who are not members, but could potentially assist us with future initiatives. We will aim to connect, and hopefully recruit some of these experienced editors to support our work.
Our grant-making has recently ramped up, and we have funded a new WiR in partnership with the University of Otago. The increase in grant-making has led to a review of how we manage grant applications, with an expectation that we may soon face the need to choose between competing applications for constrained funding. Our Treasurer is leading this project and seeking input from the wider committee on deciding key outcomes that we want to achieve with partnerships. This will be a key discussion at our upcoming strategy weekend at the end of July 2025.
We have increased our support of, and presence, at GLAM events. We invested in swag (t-shirts, posters, stickers etc), registrations for committee, for members and for staff. We also invested in running a promotional booth at our National Digital Forum (NDF). This event widened the reach of our newsletter, with many attendees signing up, and giving us more visibility within the GLAM industry, and in building relationships while generating interest in our work. We will be widening the net, looking further forward so we are prepared and have the funding to make the best use of available opportunities for engagement with the GLAM sector. WANZ is funding our Wikipedian-at-Large, and another WANZ member who is a librarian, to attend the annual conference of LIANZA, our national library organisation, in September 2025.
Attendance has generally increased at our edit-a-thons. This is due to a multi-pronged mix of good organiser management by some of our most active editors, solid support from our paid team, earlier project set up and increased marketing and communications across all of our platforms. These things, along with the active support and attendance by our committee and membership have contributed to this reporting year’s success.
We are developing our Communications Policy and Strategy to guide our communications in alignment with the strategic goals for our chapter. Identifying our target audiences and crafting our key messages provides a foundation to build our communications on, supporting effective, targeted messaging. We are planning to develop case studies which highlight our successful projects and partnerships to help to back up this messaging.
We are using multiple platforms to reach our audience: we use Bluesky (since 2025) , LinkedIn, our website and Facebook. We no longer post on Twitter/X. WANZ has begun to build an audience on Instagram as that is where many of our young people are. We provide direct, timely updates to our members and collaborators via our monthly newsletter, and will use analytics to ensure this continues to meet our readers’ needs. The use of a range of social media channels to spread our word, alongside our news blog on our website and building relationships with reporters is working well.
3. Please provide a link to reports that detail the activities that took place in the last year. This can include an annual report, Meta pages, and websites. If there are no links available, briefly describe the implemented activities and programs below or upload any files. (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 3.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.1 (Affiliate health & resilience), 4.1 (Internal engagement), 4.2 (Community connection), and 4.3 (Partnerships and collaboration):
- Describe your activities engaging new users, new members for your decision-making body(ies), and developing leaders and organizers (2.1).
- Describe your activities creating or hosting spaces to encourage greater collaboration and engagement among your members (4.1).
- Describe how you engage with the contributing community that you serve and/or support (4.2).
- Describe your partnerships with other affiliates or with non-Wikimedia entities (4.3).
Main links to WANZ work 2024/2025:
WANZ Annual Community Activity Report 24/25: This report is a collaborative effort supported by many individual editors in our community. It documents 12 months of community activities, including links to information, outreach work, events, and reports. This page promotes transparency and keeps our members and community up to date. We invite our members, editors, organisers, and the wider Aotearoa New Zealand editing community to contribute by documenting their own work. It is also used to encourage participation in the affiliate by editors who are sometimes hesitant to join in. It reflects the diversity of work by the community and includes activities outside of the affiliate business plan but which the affiliate often supports. This is an important tool for our internal engagement.
[1]: The WANZ website is improving all the time, as we add information and links. We now write regular news stories detailing our work, and the work of the wider movement.
WANZ Strategy and Business Planning: Our committee (Board) gets together face to face twice a year. We meet at the beginning of each grant year for a Strategy weekend to review what we have done to date, and to update our strategy. Prior to the submission deadline for the following year's grant, we meet for a business planning session to finalise plans and budgets that will implement our revised strategy. These are the relevant links to our strategy and business planning documents: WANZ Strategy 2024-2027, Business Planning actions from February 2025, Strategy actions from 2024, Review against strategic goals.
Links to newsletters: We send out a monthly newsletter to our members and to interested people in the wider community. Our first newsletter went out in August 2024 and has improved greatly since our marketing and communications coordinator came on board later in the year. Our newsletter now goes out to nearly double the number of people that it did 12 months ago due to an increase in our membership, and an increase in people on our mailing list. Our newsletters are a key means of reporting to our community about what we are doing.
[2]: Our meta page is useful to keep up to date as it assists us with our reporting and knowledge sharing and offers information and transparency to our community.
WikiCon Aotearoa/Christchurch 2025: We held our annual WikiCon in our second largest city in 2025 and the result was the largest gathering of New Zealand Wikipedians to date, 38 registrations and 33 in attendance. The multi pronged approach of a dedicated sub-committee, early and regular communications, the provision of scholarships and having two or three committee members in the city contributed to the success of the conference. It has been difficult in the past to collect feedback from event participants. We encouraged feedback from attendees by offering incentives, such as a mystery prize. This worked well and we received feedback from the majority of attendees: WikiCon2025 Feedback
The hiring of a Marketing and Communications Coordinator has been instrumental in getting us local and national media coverage which has assisted us with spreading the word and growing our movement base. Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand was featured in local and national media twelve times between July 2024 and June 2025, including:
New Zealand public service broadcaster Radio New Zealand
- Correcting history, one edit at a time
- Wikipedia, a surprising repository of fact
- Wikipedia needs you!
- The Panel with Wallace Chapman
Banks Peninsula media outlets covering the 2025 Wikipedian at Large
- Wikipedians to shine a light on Banks Peninsula
- Putting the Peninsula on Wiki
- Putting Banks Peninsula on the Wiki map
And other media outlets
- Join the fun at Te Papa with a Wikipedia editathon
- Redressing the gender imbalance on Wikipedia
- La Fiesta brings a month of events to Whanganui
- Wikimedians, unite: The people ensuring NZ's stories are on Wikipedia
- ‘Obsession’ leads to Wikipedian placement
As stated earlier engaging new members of our Board has been difficult as we lost three members of the Board over the past year. All were active contributors to the movement and two remain active as editors and organisers. Our relationship with one of our partners working with our student programme assisted us and we now have two students on the Board to increase their governance knowledge and to assist us with engaging with youth. Editors and staff assisted with the inclusion of two more people - one deeply involved in the wiki movement, and the other who is relatively new to the movement bringing more useful skills to the table. This is an area of importance for WANZ to be able to be resilient to unexpected changes.
We sponsored a booth at our National Digital Forum conference [3] which was a major conference for the GLAM sector with over 200 delegates attending. This was our first time reaching out in this way to potential partners, editors and organisers. One of our ex committee members, Avocadobabygirl presented her paper "GLAM people make great Wiki editors" and she ran a workshop titled "Get your people on Wiki! How to get leadership support and give staff the skills to make impactful contributions." Our investment included registration for two committee members and one paid staff member, the booth space, and swag for the event (t-shirts, stickers, flyers, posters etc). We consider this event a success as many useful connections were made and we increased our newsletter mailing list by close to 60% in the GLAM and digital sectors. This will assist us well with potential future partnerships and collaborations. NDF Report link.
Our Wikipedian in Residence (WiR) at Auckland Museum mentors the students programme and was a student herself in the role in the past. Not only has this given us good insight into better ways to engage with younger people, but it has widened our reach in our biggest city, with students engaging widely with the community, and with Wikimedia projects. Formal reporting from this WiR for the 2024-2025 period is expected in August, but the website gives a good indication of activities.
During this reporting year we have succeeded in organising regular meet-ups in three of our main cities. Our WiR and student programme in Auckland has assisted in our biggest city, and having two ex committee members (one our Wikipedian at Large), and one current committee member based in Christchurch, helped to get regular meetups underway in Christchurch. We are now in partnership with Otago University in Dunedin supporting a WiR, with one of our committed editors and organisers, and we hope this will support the set up of regular meetups in Dunedin in the near future. The Wellington meetup continues to go well with solid attendance.
Links to information on our major projects:
Aotearoa Wikipedian at Large - WANZ provided a grant for a 12 month project
Auckland Museum - Wikimedian in Residence 2025
University of Otago - Wikipedian in Residence 2025
The New Zealand Thesis Project
Wikipedia / Radio New Zealand Critter of the Week Project
Wikipedia New Zealand Project: New Zealand National Parks
Wikidata New Zealand Project: New Zealand Women Photographers
Links to grants:
To Auckland Museum for a 12 month Wikipedian in Residence project
To Giantflightlessbirds the annual Wikimedian at Large grant for 2025.
To the organisers of the Auckland monthly meetup
To Ambrosia10 to attend the joint Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) 2024 conference in Okinawa, Japan
To Pakoire, organiser of Lisa’s Wikipedia Reading and Writing Book Club project
To the organisers Ambrosia10, Stitchbird2 and Noracrentiss of the two New Zealand Species Edit-a-thons
To Jonathanischoice to organise a photography session to photograph rare brass instruments and upload to Wikimedia Commons
To Richlitt to learn to use Open Refine and Wikidata
To Ambrosia10, with in-kind support from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), a Wikimedian in Residence grant.
To Pakoire, a conference grant to attend and present at WikiCon Australia
To Giantflightlessbirds a grant to supplement funding already raised from third party sources for the Ashburton WikiProject.
New Zealand Women in Architecture WikiProject.
To Eyeup, to support a Women in Red Editathon
Ten travel scholarships to support editors to attend Wikicon2025 in Christchurch
To DrThneed and Giantflightlessbirds for a 6 month part-time Wikipedian in Residence project at University of Otago
Links to Edit-a-thons:
2024 July 13 Te Papa Research Expeditions Edit-a-thon, Wellington
2024 September 22 New Zealand Women in Architecture WikiProject and Edit-a-thon, Auckland
2024 September 28 and October 12 Te Maori Edit-a-thons, Wellington
2024 October 19 and 2024 November 2 New Zealand Species Edit-a-thons at Ōtari-Wilton's Bush, Wellington
2025 January 25 Stub It Out: Developing Tāmaki's Wiki Stub Articles Edit-a-thon, Auckland
2025 February 8 & 9 Women in Red Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Whanganui
2025 March 7 International Women's Day 2025 Edit-a-thon, Dunedin
2025 March 15 Wiki101 Edit-a-thon, Auckland
2025 April 6 New Zealand Women in Architecture WikiProject and Edit-a-thon, Auckland
2025 May - June 1Lib1Ref NZ and Australia
Links to Peer-reviewed papers:
Pasifika arts Aotearoa and Wikipedia - Sophia Coghini and Lisa Maule had a publication relating to encouraging Pasifika editors to contribute to Wikipedia published in July 2024.
Delving Into Te Papa Research Expedition Data - Ambrosia10 and Avocadobabygirl had a publication relating to Wikidata published in August 2024
Advancing Community Curation of Research Expeditions: A Collaborative Journey with Wikidata and Biodiversity Information Standards - Ambrosia10 was a co-author on this paper published in October 2024
Integrating Wikidata with Data Sleuthing Techniques for Enhanced Knowledge Discovery of Hidden Figures - Ambrosia10 was a co-author of these peer reviewed course materials published by BCEENET- Biological Collections in Ecology & Evolution Network in December 2024
The New Zealand Thesis Project: Connecting a Nation’s Dissertations Using Wikidata. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 13(1), eP18295 - Tamsin Braisher was first author on this paper published in March 2025.
The women honoured in flowering plant genera: From myth to reality - Ambrosia10 was a co-author of this paper published in June 2025.
Links to representation at other conferences supported by WANZ:
July 2024 XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid, Spain - Ambrosia10 and Stitchbird2The conference report is available.
September 2024 SPNHC/TDWG 2024 in Okinawa, Japan. Link to presentation here, link to conference report here.
5-6 May 2025 National Digital Forum - WANZ funded two registrations and ran a booth. An ex committee member gave a presentation and ran a workshop.
May - June 2025 BirdsNZ Conference - Richlitt presented on taxonomic work he was able to do through his OpenRefine grant from WANZ.
Social media links, followers as at July 2025:
- LinkedIn - 359
- Bluesky - 234
- Facebook - 387
- Instagram - 29
4. Are you interested in sharing what you achieved or learned this year with the wider community through different peer learning programs (e.g. Let's Connect program, Diff)? (optional)
Yes. WANZ is open to sharing our achievements and learning. We have joined the Let’s Connect programme but have not yet shared. Writing a Diff blog to share our learnings is not something we have done to date, or encouraged our editors and organisers to do. It feels like it is a good next step as a chapter to be more present in these spaces.
With our part-time communications and marketing coordinator, we now have increased capacity to re-use and share our stories with the wider Wikimedia community. We will look at ways to share our achievements and learnings more formally in the coming year.
5. Did you collect feedback from your community or target groups on how the activities implemented impacted them? If yes, please attach/provide information on the results (e.g. community surveys, stories, impact booklets/reports, interviews with partner institutions, etc). Did you collect other impact-specific data? (required)
For affiliates, the response to Question 5. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criteria 4.1 (Internal Engagement), 4.2 (Community Connection), or 4.3 (Partnerships & collaboration), where applicable.
NZ Species Edit-a-thon report: Feedback from this event was very positive. All 12 attendees who were not organisers gave feedback. The day was seen as valuable and enjoyable with attendees learning a lot about editing Wikipedia articles and uploading images into Wikimedia Commons and they felt excited. They appreciated the social element of the event and felt that the community is an “awesome supportive environment”. They stated their confidence in editing had increased and they were highly likely to be involved with the Wikimedia community in the future. This event was very successful for community connection.
WikiCon2025 Feedback: Our annual WikiCon was the largest gathering of Wikipedians in New Zealand. We offered a mystery prize to attendees if they completed our feedback form. This proved to be successful and most attendees submitted feedback which was positive, with some good ideas for future events. Topics for the conference were voted on by registered people which went down well, but it wasn’t necessarily a good approach for newbies. We learned that people need more downtime and more time between sessions to take a breath, get things done, and interact with each other. One of the impacts of this event was a strengthening of the community and the improved literacy and knowledge about the wiki movement. We learned how important it is to collect feedback so we understand our impact, and are constantly improving and getting good ideas from attendees.
This year we are planning to ask organisers to seek feedback from participants at all events. Our impact is increasing as relationships from successful WANZ partnerships continue to grow, and collaborations increase.
6. During the fund period, did your efforts do any of the following? (required):
For affiliates, the response to Question 6. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criterion 2.2 (Diversity balance).
- 6.1 Bring in participants from the following groups: women, young people, underrepresented geographical regions (ESEAP, LATAM, SSA, MENA, SA)
- 6.2 Develop content about the following underrepresented topics or groups of people: women, indigenous groups, underrepresented geographical regions (ESEAP, LATAM, SSA, MENA, SA)
- 6.3 Support the retention of: Editors, Organizers, Partnerships, Wikimedians in Residence positions
7. What, if any, effective tactics or approaches can you share that worked well when dealing with the programs under points 6.1-6.3 that you selected? (optional)
Providing scholarships to members to attend our annual New Zealand WikiCon (held in May 2025 in Christchurch) was an effective tactic. Although the scholarships budget was half of the total budget, it was effective in getting a range of people to the event. This enabled a broader mix of members and editors to get together, including younger members still studying at University, or in the early stages of their careers. We see this as a useful tactic, as people did not have to spend their own money on travel and accommodation while also giving up their weekend.
We are lucky to have many active editors and organisers and fully involved committee members. The warmth and commitment they bring to the movement can be felt by participants. There is a great sense of community with many different people coming together with similar interests.
8. If you developed partnerships, which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors (optional):
Board members’ outreach, Volunteers from our communities, Partners proactive interest
Part 2: Metrics for Year 2
[edit]| Wikimedia Metrics | Target (Year 2) | Results (Year 2) | Comments and tools used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | 250 | 399 | The number of participants in activities as per our dashboard is 146, 98 after removing duplicates. The link to our overarching dashboard: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/campaigns/wikimedia_aotearoa_new_zealand_july_2024_to_june_2025/users.
We have included duplicates as it is too time consuming to manually check individual User accounts to prevent double counting. |
| Number of all editors | 50 | 98 | New and retained new editors is a manual count of attendees across events which is not an exact science. We plan to seek new editor information at all of our events in the coming financial year. This will make it easier to follow up. |
| Number of new editors | N/A | 8 | |
| Number of retained editors | N/A | 6 | |
| Number of all organizers | 16 | 18 | We haven’t specifically used approaches to increase our organisers, but we realise that is an area for development. We ensure that our students are mentored by experienced Wikipedians including the WiR at Auckland Museum. Our Wikipedian at Large is very active throughout the country presenting, setting up attending meetups, conferences and thematic projects to broaden our base and train new editors.
We currently rely on Australia online training, and this is something we will be organising here in New Zealand including looking at pairing new editors and organisers with appropriate experienced organisers to ensure we have enough, and do not overwork our volunteers who are already very active in the movement. |
| Number of new organizers | N/A | 2 |
| Wikimedia project | Target - Number of created pages (Year 2) | Target - Number of improved pages (Year 2) | Result - Number of created pages (Year 2) | Result - Number of improved pages (Year 2) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 360 | 253 | ||
| Wikimedia Commons | 708 | |||
| Wikidata | 294 | 8490 | ||
| Wiktionary | ||||
| Wikisource | ||||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||||
| Translatewiki | ||||
| MediaWiki | ||||
| Wikiquote | ||||
| Wikivoyage | ||||
| Wikibooks | ||||
| Wikiversity | ||||
| Wikinews | ||||
| Wikispecies | ||||
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
Tool used and comments (optional):
We have used our outreach dashboard to collate this information. We look forward to a tool being developed to assist with this. We have active contributors on Wikisource and other wikis, but no real way to count the contributions or improvements.
11. Did you set other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): No
11.1. Other Metrics.
In your application, you outlined some other open metrics that you would like to measure. Please fill out the achieved results for each of the open metrics you defined.
| Other Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volunteer hours organising |
|
500 hours | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| GLAM partnerships sustained |
|
5 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Growing membership numbers |
|
40 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Part 3: Skill Development / Capacity Building
[edit]12. Reflecting on your programmatic (external) and organizational (internal) work, did your grant support you to undergo any skill development that made a difference to your success? If yes, what skill was developed, and how did it lead to success? (e.g. received coaching on public speaking, attended training on nonviolent communication, hosted professional development conversations on leadership, learned and used a new tool for project management, etc.)? Can you share any materials? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 12.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.2 (Diversity balance) and 3.1 (Diverse, Skilled, and Accountable Leadership):
- Describe actions taken to prioritize gender balance in affiliate leadership, as well as any areas of diversity relevant to your affiliate's context (2.2).
- Describe the management, financial, or other leadership skills of your affiliate leaders. If you have a succession plan, please include it here (3.1).
- Describe any training or skill development (as outlined in the question above) (3.1).
- Incorporate into the annual report a disclosure of conflict of interests (if any) from the leadership (3.1).
We use our annual two day strategy weekend mid-year to think about our impact, growth and strategy for the coming year(s), and we have a one day business planning meeting in February/March to check in and make changes as required. We also use our strategy weekend for skill development of our governance board and team. Umbrella Wellbeing is an organisation we invited to come and talk to us about our resilience and how to handle conflict and stressful situations, which we found helpful for managing and developing policy about maintaining safe spaces on our social media channels, and our meetups.
We also invited Good Sense Marketing to come and speak to our team about key messaging and developing relationships with media. This was very helpful for both the Board, and for our Marketing and Communications Coordinator to help us spread our word and broaden our base.
Volunteer Management training and Governance Training through BoardPro has been completed by our Executive Advisor, to improve our approach to Board meetings, and to better understand volunteer involvement and engagement.
Our Board all completed "Concise Online Te Tiriti training" aimed at increasing the knowledge and basic understanding of Māori issues, and to “appreciate the historical and current relevance of Te Tiriti, to recognise some of the ongoing impacts of colonisation, to identify actions that you can take personally to uphold Te Tiriti”. This has deepened our understanding of our own history in New Zealand.
We have invited a Maori consultant to speak to us at our next strategy weekend to assist us to develop an appropriate strategy for engaging with our Maori community.
During the period, we arranged for the development of one of our affiliate committee members as a backup Treasurer. Access to our online accounting system (Xero) has been arranged for this person, and initial familiarisation training has been completed.
Conflicts of interest affecting any of the committee members are disclosed and recorded in a register that forms part of the minutes of each committee meeting.
13. What is one capacity/skill area that you would like to focus on for the next year? And how do you plan to achieve this capacity? (required)
The recruitment and training of organisers and editors is a key area we would like to develop. We are aware that we currently rely on a small core group of editors and organisers to develop and train others (in a volunteer capacity) and we do not want to overburden them. We wish to develop more people capable of taking on this role, including our paid staff, and plan to organise this in 2025/2026.
14. If you have additional information or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here. Use the space below to upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your report.
For affiliates, also use this section (Question 14) to fulfill the Affiliate Health Criteria requirements.
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for affiliate governance, including affiliate leadership and membership with a breakdown of the demographics; how elections are conducted; how conflicts of interest are declared; and how decisions are made and communicated (2.2, 2.3, 3.1).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for activities incorporating, promoting awareness about, or enforcing the Universal Code of Conduct in your affiliate's activities (3.3).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for internal membership engagement, such as notes from your regular meetings and how you communicate to or involve your membership (4.1).
14.1 Newsletters
We publish newsletters to keep our membership up to date with activities. Please refer back to section 3 where this is discussed in more detail.
14.2 Other public document - Annual Performance Report
WANZ is a registered charity in New Zealand, and is subject to reporting requirements under the Charities Act. We provide an annual Performance Report to Charities Services (who administer the Act). Note that our report is for our financial year January to December, not the WMF grant year. Our annual report for the 12 month period ending 31 December 2024 is publicly available from the Charities Services website: [4], under Annual Returns.Here is a direct link to a copy of the Performance Report that WANZ submitted for the year ending 31 December 2024:
Part 4: Financial reporting
[edit]For affiliates, also use this section (Part 4: Financial reporting) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 3.2 (Financial & Legal Compliance).
| Description | Amount spent (NZD) |
|---|---|
| Personnel costs | 108828 |
| Operational costs | 23144.47 |
| Programmatic costs | 191740.26 |
| Total (Year 2) | 323712.73 |
| Other revenue | 454 |
| Remaining funds (Year 2) | 7322 |
15. Please state the total amount spent from this fund in your local currency. (required)
323712.73 NZD
16. Please provide an overview of the amount spent from this fund in the following budget categories in your local currency. (required)
- Operational costs: 23144.47 NZD
- Programmatic costs: 191740.26 NZD
- Staff and contractor costs: 108828 NZD
17. Did you have any other revenue sources (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): Yes
- 17.1. Provide the total amount received from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 9819 NZD
- 17.2. Provide the total amount spent from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 454 NZD
18. Provide a financial report document which will provide the details of funds received and spent in the currency of your fund. (required)
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
17.1 notes: Note 1. This income from other sources includes bank interest, donations, membership subscriptions and event registration fees
Note 2. This income from other sources does not include the grant we received from WMF in our role as Fiscal Sponsor for a Rapid Grant of NZD 3,740 to Tamsin Braisher for a project "How to Wikify a Conference". We are accounting for this and reporting on it separately.
17.2 Note Note 3. This expenditure against income from other sources does not include expenditure against the grant we received from WMF in our role as Fiscal Sponsor for a Rapid Grant of NZD 3,740 to Tamsin Braisher for a project "How to Wikify a Conference". We are accounting for this and reporting on it separately.
18.2. If you have not already done so in your financial spending report, provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal. (optional)
The Year 2 tab of the spreadsheet linked above includes comments in column X against each row. The most significant variances are:
- We were able to fund a part-time Wikipedian-in-Residence (WiR) at the University of Otago. This opportunity was not foreseen at the time of preparing our budget, and was in addition to our existing commitment to funding a WiR at Auckland Museum. This led to substantial over-expenditure against the original budget provision for WiR, but was accommodated through under-expenditure against other budget categories. The WiR at University of Otago is underway as at 30 June 2025.
- There was significant expenditure over the original budget for the time of our contracted support person providing communications services. This arose partly through recruitment costs and mobilisation, but also from the need to support our participation as a sponsor at the National Digital Forum.
- We decided to take up a sponsor role at the National Digital Forum 2025 conference held in Wellington as a means of engaging with representatives of the GLAM sector in New Zealand, raising our profile, and making them aware of potential funding opportunities for Wiki-related projects. This opportunity was not identified at the time of preparing our budget, but proved to be effective. We have added the direct expenditure as a new row in the expenditure report, for transparency. Our two contractors also put time into supporting our participation in this event, but we have not split out the costs of their time to add into this row.
- We are overspent against the budget allowance for funding editathons. We funded five editathons, against an original budget for just three.
19. Do you have any unspent funds from this funding?: Yes
- 19.1. Please list the amount of unspent funds in your local currency. (required)
- 7322
- 19.2. Explain why you did not use the amount. (required)
- The unspent balance is $7,322.22 (representing only 2.2% of the total grant for 2024-25).
The Year 2 tab of the spreadsheet linked in 18.1 above includes comments about variances in column X against each row. The most significant variances are summarised in our response in 18.2 above
- 19.3. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
- B. Propose to use them to partially or fully fund a new/future request with PO approval
- 19.4. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
- At the end of the 2023-24 grant period (ie the year before this reporting period), there was a significant sum that was unspent. It was agreed with the Programme Officer that this amount could be retained by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand to establish an Operational Reserve. A policy was developed to describe this operational reserve. The description in the policy document says: "Requirements for establishing and managing a reserve fund to manage contingencies, take advantage of new opportunities that arise within a planning period, and ensure the medium term financial stability of the Society".
We have not had need to access the Operational Reserve during the 2024-25 period, and it remains on deposit in a dedicated bank account. We remain of the view that it is prudent to hold an Operational Reserve, for the reasons set out in the policy description. The current amount of the reserve would cover less than 3 months of our total projected annual operating expenditure.
Note: during the 2024-25 year we have raised the profile of WANZ within the GLAM sector in New Zealand, and we expect to receive multiple applications for funding projects. Only some of these proposals will be known/submitted by the time that we must firm up our grant submission to WMF for the 2026-2029 period. Retaining an Operational Reserve will allow us flexibility to consider funding some project opportunities that are not identified at present, but that are either beyond what we can fund within the GSG allowances in the current year, or that come to our attention after the due date for the 2026-2029 period submission in March 2026.
We propose to add the unspent funds from the 2024-25 grant year to our Operational Reserves.
20. Final confirmations (required)
- 20.1. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement? You must be in compliance with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement. In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
- 20.2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
- 20.3. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
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