Wikipedia wants to hear your Northland stories

''Wikipedian'' Mike Dickison wants to meet knowledgeable Northlanders. Photo / Wikimedia

If you have a story about Northland to share, ''Wikipedian'' Mike Dickison wants to meet you.

Dickison will be based in Kerikeri this Thursday when he hopes to meet current editors of Wikipedia — a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia — as well as experts in obscure fields and people who just want to know how Wikipedia works.

Since becoming interested in Wikipedia in 2009, the entomologist (insect expert) by profession has created or improved hundreds of articles.

Now he's spending a year touring the nation's knowledge repositories in a bid to improve New Zealand-related Wikipedia entries using expertise he encounters along the way.

Dickison said his aim was to fill in the gaps in New Zealand's Wikipedia profile.

"If you search for anything about New Zealand on Wikipedia you'll often only get 'stubs' – very short articles that have yet to be developed – or badly written entries," he said.

"The gaps are numerous. There are relatively few pages on Pacific or New Zealand history, for example, and most of the articles on New Zealand historical figures are about white men. As article subjects, Maori and women are scarce."

New Zealand was five to 10 years behind the rest of the Western world in the quality of its Wiki entries, which he put down to isolation and people not knowing how easy it was to become a Wikipedia editor.

Dickison will be based at the Honey House Café, behind Kemp House at Kerikeri Basin, from 10am-3pm this Thursday, October 4, for individual chats. From 5-7pm, also at the Honey House, he will give a presentation on how Wikipedia works and how the public can get involved. Entry is free to both events.

The ''Wikipedian-at-large", who is the curator of natural history at Whanganui Regional Museum in normal life, will be hosted by Heritage New Zealand during his stay in Kerikeri. His year on the road is funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.