Auckland Museum Wiki Workplan
Auckland Museum has been engaging with Wikimedia platforms since 2017, but in 2023 this work took a new shape. After receiving a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to focus on developing Wikipedia content on local suburbs and areas around Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Auckland Museum has continued to explore how we can use Wikipedia as a learning resource for the new Aotearoa New Zealand history curriculum and promote open access and shared knowledge.
Summer Studentships
As part of this project, from November 2023 to February 2024 Auckland Museum hosted and trained four tertiary students supported by the Wikimedia Foundation Alliance fund. The summer student editors contributed to the existing Wikiproject, Understanding our past using Wikipedia as a tool to support local history in Tāmaki Makaurau. The 10-week project encouraged students to develop articles on local history content they felt passionate about. Topics included queer history, Te Ao Māori, South Auckland places and migrant communities. The students also hosted an edit-a-thon, Trailblazers of Tāmaki Makaurau at Auckland Museum Library Te Pātaka Mātāpuna, to train new Wikipedia editors within the theme of significant figures to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. The studentship contributed to the development of this project, contributions can be viewed here.
As a result of the success of the first summer student cohort, at the end of 2024, Auckland Museum will welcome five new summer students funded by the Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Equity Fund to build on this work. The continuation of these studentships and projects will fulfil aims to further increase and diversify content on Wikipedia related to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Project Outreach
The project has been shared at various conferences with James Taylor presenting “GLAMs, Wikipedia and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories” at the National Digital Forum in May 2022, “Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum” at Wikimania Singapore 2023 and “GLAMs and the Aotearoa NZ Histories Curriculum” at the National Digital Forum in March 2024. Marty Blayney also presented, “Auckland Museum suburb article project” at WikiCon Wellington in March 2023. The four 2023/24 summer students presented, "How we started editing Wikipedia and what we learnt?” at Wikicon Aotearoa 2024 in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and later in May attended and presented “Editing Wikipedia to understand our part: Enriching Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s local history on Wikipedia” at the 2024 ESEAP conference in Kota Kinabula, Malaysia.
Events
In addition to the Trailblazers of Tāmaki Makaurau edit-a-thon, Auckland Museum has hosted reoccurring community led events such as walking tours and edit-a-thons, organised by Architecture + Women NZ. Women in Architecture events aim to increase visibility of women and non-binary people in architecture and related fields in Aotearoa New Zealand on Wikipedia and encourage more women and non-binary people to edit and engage with Wikimedia platforms. Two events took place over two weekends in May and September, which included walking tours and edit-a-thons held in the Auckland Museum learning labs. This appears to have been a successful model, moving away from museum-focused to community-focused engagement.
Find out more on our project page and through This Month in GLAM and This Month in Education.
Wiki Workplan 2024-2025
Building off the previous year’s workplans we will be continuing to develop our core aims of engaging with the community, enhancing content on Wikipedia and enriching content available on Wikimedia Commons and other Wiki projects.
With the appointment of a full-time Auckland Museum Wikimedian in Residence (a first in Aotearoa New Zealand) funded by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, this year’s workplan will particularly focus on the community engagement goal. In doing this the museum has aims to foster connections with Wikimedia communities to facilitate sustainable and responsive relationships. This aligns with the Auckland Museum Path to 2029 goals, to foster curiosity and learning inspired by compelling onsite, offsite and online experiences.
These goals will enable communities to connect, gather and share stories and experiences that are unique to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand and our place in the Pacific, using Wikimedia as a tool for this connection. In embracing the transformative power of technology, we aim to engage and captivate our audiences and extend our reach beyond physical boundaries of the museum and enhance accessibility to knowledge and global reach.
With Auckland Museum’s wider goals of collecting, preserving, and sharing the cultural and natural histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Wikimedia will serve as an educational tool to encourage all individuals to engage with their understanding of themselves, Aotearoa New Zealand’s history and the world around them.
Looking forward, Auckland Museum has identified that Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland is ethnically and culturally diverse home to people from over 120 different ethnicities. Population projections indicate that people identifying with pacific cultural heritages will increase as well as the growth of our Asian population. Our goals and projects will aim to reflect these histories and stories too.
Workplan Actions 2024-2025
Our main aims for this year continue to follow our past workplans, concentrating on engaging with the Wiki community, enhancing content on Wikipedia with research and knowledge from the Museum, and enriching Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons with new data and open imagery.
Engage with Community:
- Host at least four community and public events to encourage new Wikimedia usership and grow the Wikimedia Aotearoa community. These will include:
Newbie Edit-a-thon: Will encourage and welcome complete beginners to learn about the basics of Wikipedia and editing
Online Cenotaph Edit-a-thon: Will support the Wikiproject x Online Cenotaph which aims to increase content on Wikimedia drawing from Auckland Museum’s Online Cenotaph database
Migrants of Colour Stories Aotearoa Edit-a-thon: Will support the Wikiproject Migrants of Colour Stories Aotearoa and call out to community to get involved creating and adding to related articles
Aotearoa Asian Artists: Will increase the visibility of Asian artists in Aotearoa on Wikidata and Wikipedia
- Reach out to existing local, national and international Wikimedia community, and attend local Auckland, wider Aotearoa New Zealand and online international meetups
Explore opportunities to collaborate with Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)
- Train and mentor five new Wikipedia editors as part of the wider 2024-25 Auckland Museum Summer Studentship programme, and connect the students the wider Aotearoa Wikimedia community
Enrich Wikimedia Content:
- Utilise Auckland Museum’s Online Cenotaph database to improve Aotearoa New Zealand War related content on Wikimedia (WikiProject x Online Cenotaph)
- Explore migrant stories and histories, presenting the diversity of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s histories (WikiProject: Migrants of Colour Stories Aotearoa)
- Create further pages on endemic species in the Auckland Region that currently do not have pages and enhance existing pages on species of importance in the Auckland Region
- Linking articles and data of Auckland Museum Medal recipients
Enhance analytics:
- Investigate new ways of measuring the impact of the work we do as per the Museum’s new five-year strategy, Path to 2029
Enhance data and images on Wikipedia:
- Continue to make Auckland Museum collections and resources available and accessible on Wikimedia platforms by uploading openly licensed content to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource
- Create new templates for Museum images uploaded to Wikicommons
- Explore how we can enhance existing uploaded content with structured data
- Hold 1Lib1Ref event at Auckland Museum Research Library (runs from 15th January – 5th February, and 15th May- 5th June 2025)
- Categorising Aotearoa New Zealand endemic species images: identifying endemic species, ensuring that their Wikidata items/ Wikimedia Commons/ Wikipedia pages consistently describe them as endemic, and sourcing available images of these taxa from sources such as Collections Online, Te Papa, or iNaturalist
Enrich Wikidata:
- Work on project to interconnect Auckland Museum Library resources through Wikidata
Contribute to enriching and creating Wikidata items for Asian Aotearoa artists