Mike Dickison
Wikipedian
Mike Dickison’s favourite dinosaur is styracosaurus. There, now it’s in print, so it could turn up in the Wikipedia bio page that this profile will arguably make Dickison notable enough to qualify for.
The country’s first Wikipedian-at-large just arrived in Wellington after three months helping Auckland institutions understand the possibilities of the online encyclopaedia that’s now the fifth most visited website in the world.
It’s part of a year-long mission to help tap the Kiwi potential of the mega information portal, paid for by Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the website.
In Northland, he recorded Ma¯ ori pronunciations to add to Wikipedia articles. In Auckland, he helped Landcare Research upload for free use thousands of beautiful scientific illustrations that have been languishing largely unused since the 1990s. That’s the New Zealand public’s intellectual property, so we should all be able to use it, he argues.
In Wellington, he’ll work with Zealandia wildlife sanctuary and Forest & Bird, Wellington Archives, Culture and Heritage and the Department of Conservation, teaching them to harness the power of internationally searchable information.
It’s the perfect job for a biologist, science communicator and former Whanganui Museum curator, who has one of the most diverse CVs around.
At 49, Dickison’s 4WD has become his mobile office. There’s a big suitcase of clothes; a tent and sleeping bag; a plastic bin with his library for the year – that new Rutherford book and Andreas Reischek’s travels in New Zealand. That’s Andreas Reischek, 19th century naturalist.
There’s a bin of tech gadgets for running Wikipedia edit-a-thons, and another plastic bin of insect-collecting equipment. Since his caravaning, exploring Christchurch childhood, Dickison has been passionate about collecting, catching, observing, identifying.
He’s just got a grant to write a book of citizen science observation projects for kids to get them away from their screens and into the outdoors. You can take the man out of his natural history curating job, but you can’t take the natural historian out of the man.
On Twitter, his user name is Adzebill; on Wikipedia heed its as ‘‘ giant flight less birds ’’. That’s a throwback to his academic research.
Azoology graduate, Dickison did his PhD on giant flightless birds. He measured moa bones and discovered Kiwi eggs aren’t really that huge for their size, it’s just they only produce one or two eggs, whereas chickens spread the same clutch weight across several eggs.
He also investigated the origins of Big Bird, who is almost certainly a giant flightless crane. Yes, Big Bird thinks he’s a canary, but really, ‘‘What does Big Bird know?’’.
Dickison doesn’t vote in Bird of the Year, because of their outrageous bias against extinct birds. Next year, he plans to campaign for the giant Haast’s Eagle, who will run on a platform of disestablishing the contest and ruling as a dictator.
He’s a bit of a joker, more robin than bird of prey – portly, cheeky, chirpy, curious, lover of insects. But his opinions are as sharp as a Haast’s Eagle’s tiger-sized claws and he’s not afraid to share them.
There’s a lot of time-wasting going on worrying about ‘‘malarky-nonsense’’ like de-extinction and wiping out predators by genetically engineering females that produce sterile offspring, Dickison says. The closest we’ll get to bringing back moa is a genetically modified emu, although the technology could help the ka¯ ka¯ po¯ ’s woeful genetic diversity by enabling scientists to insert DNA from museum specimens.
And the process required to produce mutant sterile possums has only just been made to work in insects, in a lab.
‘‘When we all have flying cars, our traffic light systems won’t make sense, so maybe we need to have a big conference about traffic light redesign for the flying-car era,’’ Dickison says, of the hand-wringing surrounding a technology still too far off to waste energy on. How about we talk about the real philosophical issues we already have – like how we decide what species to save, he says.
Insects are the foundation of healthy forests, but we invest so little in researching them, some have probably gone extinct without us even realising. There’s only one lepidopterist researching New Zealand’s 2000-odd unique butterflies and moths – Landcare’s Robert Hoare. That’s compared to 200 native bird species – imagine the scandal if only one scientist was researching them, Dickison says.
‘‘If you had a blank slate and you had all of New Zealand’s species ranked up there, and you say ‘Where could we save the most biodiversity for the least amount of money?’ it will almost always be in invertebrates. Blocking away a few bits of forest and doing some basic predator control. Instead, we spend millions rescuing one species of bird because the public like it. So those are two completely different strategies. And the real issue to me is how can we try and bridge that gap.’’
Science, rather than emotion, needs to rebalance the conservation debate. It’s a battle he’s also fighting with New Zealand’s Wikipedia coverage.
In 1990, Dickison won a Ford Festiva car on
Wheel of Fortune. He instantly sold it to buy a Macintosh computer and desktop publishing programme Pagemaker. He’d been working as a technician at the then National Museum and had moved into exhibition development.
He did such a good job of teaching himself desktop publishing that he went on to teach computing to Yugoslavian refugees, then to teach design students at Whitireia Polytechnic in Wellington.
That DIY-ethos and tech savvy no doubt attracted him to Wikipedia. With limited marketing options as natural history curator at Whanganui Museum, he saw the encyclopaedia as a cheap way to spread information. After running editing workshops teaching locals to create and edit Wikipedia articles, he saw potential for a national role and asked Wikimedia to fund a one-year outreach position.
Because New Zealand has a Wikipedia problem. The encyclopaedia should be one of the best portals for foreigners to learn about New Zealand, but we’re 5 to 10 years behind in getting New Zealand content on there.
Institutions are failing to tap its potential, instead spending money on producing brochures and pretty websites that few people read.
In all its years of kauri dieback-awareness spending on expensive public relations people, no-one at the Ministry for Primary Industries thought to create a Wikipedia page about the disease, Dickison notes. ‘‘We volunteers did that.’’
And what New Zealand-specific information there is is sketchy and reflects the same gender and subject bias of the largely 35 to 45-year-old white males who created it. So as well as updating the Conservation Department’s threat ranking on every endangered critter’s Wikipedia page, Dickison is helping with workshops to attract more female Wikipedia editors, to fill gaps in coverage.
Dickison doesn’t yet have a Wikipedia profile page and it’s against the rules to create your own. You also need secondary sources to establish someone’s notability – for which this profile would count. But like every other potential subject, it will be up to a volunteer editor to decide whether Dickison is Wikiworthy.
His opinions are as sharp as a Haast’s Eagle’s tiger-sized claws and he’s not afraid to share them.