Siobhan Leachman

Siobhan Leachman is a New Zealand citizen scientist, open knowledge advocate, and Wikimedian whose work focuses on natural history. In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award. She transitioned to citizen science after a career in law, due to her interest in natural history and archival preservation.

Life and career Leachman is a lawyer by background and a self-described "stay-at-home mother of two". Bored after her children began attending kindergarten, with the Smithsonian Transcription Center, transcribing diaries and field journals such as those of Vernon and Florence Bailey and categorising bumblebee collections of Arthur Wilson Stelfox. She moved on to volunteer projects with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Zooniverse, the Australian Museum, and the New Zealand Virtual Herbarium. She was spending at least two hours a day on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and iNaturalist, and organised several volunteer events with Wikipedian Mike Dickison.

Leachman has presented at VALA, New Zealand's National Digital Forum, and WikidataCon. The Smithsonian invited her to be on the "Build the Crowdsourcing Community of Your Dreams" panel at SXSW in 2016. In 2018 she was awarded a travel scholarship to present at the WikiCite conference in Berkeley, where she spoke about the difficulties of finding metadata on historical biodiversity literature. In 2019 at Biodiversity Next in Leiden she spoke about using Bloodhound Tracker (now Bionomia) to link museum specimen data to collectors.

In 2019 Auckland Museum made Leachman a Companion of Auckland War Memorial Museum in recognition of her work with their openly-licensed digital collection images. She has contributed to the digitization of their openly licensed collections. In 2023 Leachman was awarded the Wikimedia Laureate award.

Leachman actively contributes to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, focusing on topics like New Zealand's natural history and underrepresented figures in science.

Selected works