Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Over the last month Te Ara had two new experiences:

• We opened up all our ‘resources’ (the images, film clips, sound files, maps, graphs, and diagrams which enrich every page of the site) for contributions from our users.  It has been a slow and steady start, but we are now starting to get really interesting pieces which really do add value to the information on Te Ara.  It is worth looking, for example, at Sarah Gallagher’s interesting comment about the unique Dunedin tradition of naming student flats, or at Emma Osment’s history of Anglo-Nubian goats, strange-looking animals with large curved noses and pedulous ears which turn out to have been bred to provide milk on sailing ships.
• We were also the subject of a cartoon for the first time.  It appeared in the Waikato Times shortly after the launch of Te Ara’s entry on the Waikato. Appearing in a cartoon can be a fraught enterprise, so we were lucky that this one, by Allan Hawkey, was sympathetic.

And for the second time we issued a new batch of three entries from our forthcoming theme, Social Connections.

The three entries do have some relationship with each other.  The largest, and undoubtedly the most sobering, is an entry on Violent crime, which surveys the tragic stories of murder and other nasty crimes like sexual assaults.  We have tried not to sensationalise this subject, which too often suffers that fate; but we hope that in clear, accurate and unemotional language we give evidence about levels of violent crime in New Zealand and tell the story of some crimes which captured the attention of the nation over the past century and a half.

The second entry, on Parenting, tells about the different ways New Zealanders have looked after their children in the past.  Clearly violent crime is at least in part a product of individuals’ inadequate upbringing.  A surprising number of our most notorious murders have involved the killing of other family members.

The third entry, on Women’s labour organisations, may seem more of an outlier.  But of course good work conditions are essential if women are to fulfil their parenting role effectively, and arguably may make some contribution to reducing violent crime.  So in their way these entries are a package. Take a look at them - you might not ‘enjoy’ them exactly, but we do promise that you will learn new things in an interesting way.