Talk:Dunedin

"Bio-technology"?

Can someone please explain to me why it is so important to preserve the hyphen in "bio[-]technology"? That's not the standard form of the word, nor common usage, nor the spelling of the linked Wikipedia article, and to be frank, to me it looks jejune and amateurish. Why has it been restored repeatedly to the point that it's starting to look like an edit war? —VeryRarelyStable 07:46, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

@General Ization: Absent an answer here, I'm going to change it back. —VeryRarelyStable 02:15, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Look at the edits of user Kapil121 and you will understand why this, among approximately 70 other edits, was reverted. (I then inadvertently reverted myself, which again made the piped value the same as the link, at which time you removed the pipe. I then restored the consensus version.) I have no particular opinion about the hyphen. General Ization ^Talk 04:06, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Does Dunedin really have "a rich Māori heritage"?

I see that there's recently been a minor edit war (more like 'an edit skirmish') - among three different editors - about whether to say "The city has a rich Scottish, Chinese and Māori heritage" or "The city has a rich Māori, Scottish, and Chinese heritage".

This, however, begs the question: Is it really accurate to say that the city of Dunedin "has a rich Māori heritage"? Obviously, Māori settled the area for centuries before Europeans arrived, and the article notes that there was a Māori settlement ("Ōtepoti") in "what is now central Dunedin", but this was "abandoned by 1826" (prior to European settlement). And unlike some other towns/cities (e.g., Rotorua, Ruatoria), there does not seem to have been much Māori influence in the town's architecture and early culture.

Of course, we don't want to cause any disrespect to Māori, but we also need to be accurate. (I note also that the current citation that's at the end of the sentence refers only to "The Chinese community of Dunedin".) PatricKiwi (talk) 21:21, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

There's also a darker bit of history; a lot of Dunedin's old stone-works, including much of the harbour reclamation, were built by Māori prisoners shipped down here after Parihaka. They were helped by the local tangata whenua and their descendants remain part of the Dunedin community. (There's a small monument to them in the Northern Cemetery, put there in the 1990s I think on what, for a long time, had been an unmarked mass grave.) Putting that together with the pre-colonial history especially around the Peninsula and the Heads, I think that's enough to warrant mentioning "Māori heritage" in the lede.

—VeryRarelyStable 02:02, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

That's interesting. Do you have a citation for this? PatricKiwi (talk) 05:48, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Here are a couple:

• McManus, Joel (4 November 2018). "The Parihaka prisoners and the legend of the caves". The Spinoff. Retrieved 29 June 2023.
• Ellison, Edward (14 November 2018). "A response to 'The Parihaka prisoners and the legend of the caves'". The Spinoff. Retrieved 29 June 2023.

Both are about a particular legend connected with the Māori prisoners and take the fact of those prisoners' being sent here and doing forced labour as background, which is less than completely satisfactory for what you want in a source. It's also apparent that there were more than one group of prisoners, including some who were brought here before Parihaka and contributed a large fraction of the work, which I hadn't realized.

—VeryRarelyStable 06:00, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

K C McDonald in his history of Dunedin municipality mentions them (and that Maori Road through the Town Belt was named after them having made it). The monument is in the Southern, not the Northern, cemetery - I have a photo of it, but it's poor quality; I could try to get a better one the next time I'm in Dunedin. Daveosaurus (talk) 08:43, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Well, there is also a monument in the Northern Cemetery, because I've seen it, though I didn't take a photo. Maybe some of them were buried in each. —VeryRarelyStable 09:28, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I'll have to go looking the next time I'm up that way. The one I know of - to find it, if you download the Southern Cemetery map on the DCC web site, it's in the gap between blocks 5C and 6A in the General section - right in the middle of the grey "2" referring to the section index. Daveosaurus (talk) 10:10, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

No it doesn't and the citation isn't related to Dunedin Maori heritage. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2406:5A00:4C54:2100:BDA0:3E4D:72A9:FC56 (talk) 10:44, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

That is not actually evidence of the claim of a 'rich Māori ... heritage' and nothing in the body currently supports the claim, which makes it uncited. Traumnovelle (talk) 21:10, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Dunedin also has the least amount of Maori people per capita when compared to Christchurch, Invercargill, Wellington, Auckland and Hamilton. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2406:5A00:4C54:2100:BDA0:3E4D:72A9:FC56 (talk) 10:53, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

October 2025

Can we please resolve this, because I see edits now pushing and pulling the citation needed tags on both Māori and Scottish, and I really hate seeing CN tags on what should be a really straightforward statement in the lead paragraph:

The city has a rich Māori, Scottish, and Chinese heritage.

I don’t really care whether we remove the tags, change or remove the word “rich”, add citations, remove certain ethnic groups, or remove the sentence wholesale, but at this point we need to decide, or to draft an RfC to get help deciding. — HTGS (talk) 21:27, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

References

I don't know that "the city has a rich X heritage" is really a verifiable statement. It's reasonable as a lede-section summary of a fuller description of that rich heritage in the body of the article (if we actually had that fuller description in any of these three cases); but it's a bit too vague to stick citations on in its own right.

There's material about Dunedin's Māori past in various more localized articles, like Whareakeake and Pūrākaunui, which could in theory be pulled into this article, but it's spread all over the place and, if just copypasted here without considerable further effort, would be more of a laundry list than a coherent account.

—VeryRarelyStable 09:55, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I believe citations are needed because what makes the statement true for those specific groups over English influence. Traumnovelle (talk) 20:44, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

I think that question is better answered by filling out the History section than by sticking citations on this very broad statement in the lede. —VeryRarelyStable 21:43, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Its an interpretative claim so it requires a citation. Saying the Presbyterian Church played a role in the establishment of Dunedin is an objective fact, making the claim that Dunedin has a rich Scottish history because of that is an interpretative claim. Traumnovelle (talk) 00:25, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

I think this sort of minor interpretation is reasonable, if we can agree that there are a good number of sources that support the fact that Māori (and Scottish, and Chinese) people had a significant part to play in the history of the city.

Alternatively: we come up with a new way to express some fact about the city’s cultural heritage that we all know to be true. Traumnovelle, can you come up with a particular wording that would be reasonable to your standards? Presumably you agree that the city’s Māori (and Scottish, and Chinese) heritage is of significance on some level? — HTGS (talk) 02:45, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't see those 3 as being more significant than the English influence on the city. The part about the Free Church of Scotland being involved in the settling of Dunedin is already mentioned in the lead as well as the fact of Dunedin having the oldest Chinese community. Overall I think the line should just be removed, the source for the Chinese heritage is poor and doesn't really support that claim in a straight forward manner. Traumnovelle (talk) 03:55, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

I think the "English influence" is simply a reflection of the fact that Dunedin is a city in New Zealand, which is an English-speaking country on account of having been colonized by the England-dominated British Empire. The statement about its "rich ... heritage" notes features of its cultural history that distinguish it from other British Empire cities.

—VeryRarelyStable 01:44, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

We aren't likely to agree, so lets default to what reliable sources say. Traumnovelle (talk) 09:40, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

We could try seeking input from other editors before we declare consensus to be hopeless. —VeryRarelyStable 09:58, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

I think I’ve come around on this point. The sentence on its own doesn’t tell the reader anything meaningful. Honestly, it would be a fine introductory sentence to a paragraph about the respective ethnic groups and their significance to the city’s history. But each fact that we follow up with to explain the depth behind this sentence would serve the reader just as well on its own, and the conflation of the three groups with each other only muddies the complex differences between the stories each have had.

I think the sentence is best deleted, and we lean on more complex statements about each of these important ethnic groups. What role did they play in Dunedin’s history? How were they affected by decisions made in the formation and evolution of the city? Why would someone say each group has a rich heritage in Dunedin? This largely exists in the lead already, but could certainly be amended and expanded further. — HTGS (talk) 23:59, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

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