Wikipedia - Victoria Leachman

In this in depth discussion, Victoria Leachman shares personal experiences as a long term Wikipedian and offers practical insight into how Wikipedia works, how to contribute effectively, and why projects such as the Missing Pages Project matter, particularly for rainbow communities and other marginalised groups.

Victoria began editing Wikipedia in 2008, during the platform’s early growth phase. With a background as a museum professional, she initially created a biography of a South African philanthropist who had donated artworks to New Zealand. Although carefully researched and cited, the article was speedily deleted, highlighting the importance of understanding Wikipedia’s community norms, notability requirements and technical processes. Rather than withdrawing, she rewrote the article from scratch and successfully published it. This formative experience shaped her understanding of Wikipedia as a collaborative, rules based and community moderated online encyclopedia.

Throughout the interview, Victoria emphasises that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a platform for marketing, personal essays or propaganda. Articles must be written in a neutral tone, supported by authoritative citations such as books, newspapers, academic research and other reliable secondary sources. The quality of an article is often judged by the strength and currency of its references. Wikipedia’s credibility, she explains, rests on large scale community engagement, with thousands of edits occurring daily and multiple editors reviewing and improving content. Over two decades, the platform has matured into a highly structured knowledge ecosystem supported by both volunteers and automated bots.

A key theme of the conversation is digital literacy. Users are encouraged to check citations, understand source quality and assess neutrality. Wikipedia reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the societies that produce its source material. Because it depends on published, authoritative references, communities that have historically been excluded from mainstream media, academic research or institutional recognition face additional barriers to representation.

This challenge is central to the Missing Pages Project, which seeks to address gaps in coverage of LGBTQIA+ communities in New Zealand. More broadly, Victoria explains that only around twenty percent of biography articles globally are about women, a statistic that has led to initiatives such as Women in Red, which focuses on creating articles for notable individuals who currently appear as red links, meaning no article yet exists.

Victoria outlines practical strategies for contributors wanting to uplift rainbow stories on Wikipedia. These include mining sources such as parliamentary debates, university theses, archival newspapers through Papers Past, authoritative institutional blog posts and publications from museums and libraries.

The discussion also covers Wikidata, a linked open data project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata allows contributors to create structured data entries with a lower notability threshold than Wikipedia itself. Victoria describes a workflow in which individuals who do not yet meet Wikipedia’s significance criteria can be entered into Wikidata with referenced facts. These entries are then available for future article creation and are often used by search engines and artificial intelligence tools to generate summaries. This approach ensures marginalised histories gain at least a minimal digital presence while further research develops.

Issues of naming and pronouns are addressed with sensitivity. On Wikipedia, current names are preferred, and deadnaming is generally avoided unless historically significant events occurred under a former name. Wikidata, however, may include multiple name fields to support disambiguation. The emphasis remains on accuracy, respect and clear referencing.

The interview also explores conflict of interest rules, particularly around editing biographies of living people. Wikipedia applies a higher bar of scrutiny to living individuals to prevent defamation and ensure factual accuracy. Contributors are advised to declare conflicts of interest and use formal article submission processes if necessary. Neutral language is essential when describing controversial figures or bigoted views. Rather than labelling someone directly, editors should cite reliable commentary that documents how actions or speeches were received.

Victoria discusses the collaborative culture of Wikipedia editing. Contributors are expected to “check their ego at the door,” understanding that articles are communal works subject to revision. Peer review, talk pages, editathons and local meetups organised through Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand provide support networks for new editors.

Artificial intelligence is acknowledged as both a challenge and a tool. While AI systems scrape Wikipedia and Wikidata content, editors may also use AI for research assistance or drafting, provided all facts are independently verified and properly cited. Hallucinations and AI inaccuracies remain an issue and must AI sourced content must be carefully checked by a human editor.

One of Victoria’s most memorable experiences was attending Wikimania in Singapore, where she met hundreds of global volunteers, from coders maintaining Wikimedia platforms to community editors preserving endangered languages. These stories illustrate the global, multilingual and collaborative nature of the Wikimedia movement.

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Victoria Leachman

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