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2024

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2024-2025 Wikipedia Summer Students

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On Monday the 18th of November we welcomed a new cohort of five Wikipedia summer students. Their projects and progress can be followed here: Auckland Museum Summer Students 2024/25

Reports

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WANZ grant - Wikimedian in Residence

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Auckland Museum successfully applied for funding from Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand (WANZ) to host a full-time Wikimedian in Residence. This project will engage a Wikimedian in Residence (WiR) for a 12-month period. The WiR will continue to work on the editing relevant Wikipedia pages to disperse Museum research and enhance and diversify Auckland local history topics. There will also be a major focus on engagement with the Auckland community, Auckland based GLAMs, national and international Wikipedia community and training Auckland Museum staff. This aims to ultimatley promote and encourage use of Wikipedia in the GLAM sector and further grow the Wikimedia community.

Winnieswikiworld started the role as Wikimedian in Residence on the 23rd of September, and progress can be followed here.

Current Projects

Reports

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2024 Women in Architecture Edit-a-thons

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Justine Goode speaks about the construction of the southern atrium of Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira during the walking tour

On 18 May 2024, the New Zealand Women in Architecture WikiProject, Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand, the University of Auckland and Auckland War Memorial Museum collaborated on a second edit-a-thon focusing on improving content on New Zealand women in architecture. The event began with a walking tour, of central Auckland, while a concurrent edit-a-thon was held at Auckland War Memorial Museum, led by Women in Architecture WikiProject organiser Lisa Maule, ending with a tutorial explaining Wikimedia Commons uploads. The edit-a-thon saw over 17 participants making contributions to Wikipedia, and led to the creation of six new articles and the expansion of 19 articles related to women in architecture.

A follow-up event was held in September 2024, beginning with a walking tour on 21 September and an edit-a-thon on 22 September. This event saw the creation of five new articles, three expanded articles, and 184 images added to Wikimedia Commons.

Reports

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  • Prosperosity; Pakoire (May 2024). "2024 Women in Architecture walking tour and edit-a-thon". This Month in GLAM. XIV (V). Retrieved 10 June 2024.

2023–2024 Summer students

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Students meeting with historian Lucy Mackintosh
Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Trailblazers of Tāmaki Makaurau event at Auckland War Memorial Museum on 27 January 2024

From November 2023 to February 2024, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira hosted four summer Wikipedia interns as a part of the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum grant, who focused on writing local history content. Students focused on developing articles based on what they felt passionate about, including queer history, Te Ao Māori, South Auckland and migrant communities, as well as some natural history, church and park pages. Project highlights include Phomen Singh, the first article to be featured as a Did You Know item on the main page, which received 9,858 views in a single day, List of parks in Papatoetoe (the largest article published by the students), Leilani Tominiko, the most organically popular article (1,822 views in one month) and Maraetai Mission Station, the first article in the project to receive a B-class rating.

By the end of the ten week programme, the four students had developed 33 articles (primarily new articles), added 72,500 words to Wikipedia and 861 new references. In total, pages the students had edited were viewed over 249,000 times by the end date of the project (16 February). The students also planned and lead their own edit-a-thon, which was held in January at Auckland Museum.

After the summer student project finished, the four students presented at WikiCon Auckland 2024 on 23 March, and at the ESEAP Conference 2024 at Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia on 10–12 May 2024 (submission information).

Events

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Blogs

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2023

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Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum grant

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Wikimania 2023 presentation on the Aotearoa New Zealand history curriculum project

Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira received a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation in 2023 focusing on developing Wikipedia content on local suburbs and areas around Auckland / Tāmaki Makaurau.

As a part of the new national history curriculum for schools across the nation, greater focus was placed on local stories, relevant to students' local areas. A major finding from Mark Sheehan's 2022 report, Wikipedia, Auckland Museum and the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum, was that New Zealand teachers, when faced this task, felt that they were unsure where to even start looking for information, and that Wikipedia articles could serve this role. Creating articles for every suburb in Auckland is a gigantic task, and teachers reported that articles on their general areas were often extremely helpful.

Throughout 2023 and early 2024, a total of 95 articles were made or improved for Auckland subregions, regional centres and suburbs.

Marty presented on the project at Wellington WikiCon 2023 in March 2023. James Taylor presented on the project at the 2022 and 2023 National Digital Forums, and at Wikimania 2023.

Presentations

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Blogs

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Reports

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Dashboards

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Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon 20 May 2023

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The 2023 Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon

On 20 May 2023, the New Zealand Women in Architecture WikiProject, the University of Auckland and Auckland War Memorial Museum collaborated on an edit-a-thon focusing on improving content on New Zealand women in architecture, featuring online participation and an in-person edit-a-thon at Auckland War Memorial Museum.

One of the largest in-person edit-a-thons to date held in Aotearoa New Zealand, the event saw over 20 editors participating, 14 new articles on women in architecture or related topics, and eight expanded pages.

Blogs

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Other events

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Reports

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2022

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Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum (2022)

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In 2022, Auckland Museum GLAM partnered with lecturer and museum curriculum developer Dr Mark Sheehan to investigate secondary school teachers' attitudes on using Wikipedia as a resource for teaching the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories (ANZH) curriculum, planned for implementation in 2023.

The report found that while Wikipedia was seen as a reliable resource for national history content, this was not true for local history content. Teachers had concerns that information would not include mātauranga Māori, diverse voices and contemporary perspectives on history. Teachers saw Wikipedia as having the potential to contribute to how students learn to think critically about sources and develop the skills to differentiate between reliable and unverified knowledge, but would need support to implement this.

Blogs

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Reports

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Events

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Regular Auckland meet-ups were scheduled for 2022 that were hosted by Auckland War Memorial Museum

Blogs

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Reports

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Dashboards

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2021

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Auckland Museum lockdown 2.0 project

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The Auckland Museum Lockdown 2.0 Work was a project during the late 2021 lockdowns in Auckland, where museum staff worked on developing pages, image tagging for Wikidata, and uploading requested images.

Auckland WikiCon 2021

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Participants at Auckland WikiCon 2021

On 17 and 18 July 2021, Auckland War Memorial Museum hosted Auckland WikiCon 2021, the second Wikimedia conference in Aotearoa New Zealand. Organised by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand in collaboration with the museum, the conference featured over 20 participants, and included presentations by the museum's Director of Collections and Research David Reeves, Online Collections Information and Partnerships Manager James Taylor (Jetaynz (talk · contribs)), Siobhan Leachman (Ambrosia10 (talk · contribs)), an introduction to WikiSource by Beeswaxcandle (talk · contribs), editing sessions led by Mike Dickison (Giantflightlessbirds (talk · contribs)) and Gertrude206 (talk · contribs), networking events, and a discussion on making the Wikimedia New Zealand User Group into an incorporated society.

Blogs

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Wikicite Grant - Wikimedian in Residence 2021

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Auckland Museum successfully applied for a Wikicite grant funding a Wikimedian in Residence. This project will engage a Wikimedian in Residence (WiR) over a five month period. The WiR will help unlock the potential knowledge held within Tāmaki Paenga Hira's academic outputs and research publications with primary focus will be loading the 450+ articles of the Records of the Auckland Museum (formerly Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum) into Wikidata as well as other publications that the museum holds the copyright for, such as AWB Powell’s Native Animals of New Zealand . This material contains all the interdisciplinary research the Museum has undertaken in the last 165 years; including world leading research on New Zealand’s biodiversity, Mātauranga Māori, the wider Moana Pacific as well as theme the of New Zealand in Conflict and in Peace. We also intend to host training events and talks to share the work we are undertaking and investigate how we build a sustainable model of knowledge gathering and publishing to continue after the project has ended.

This work builds on our existing projects with the Biodiversity Heritage Library where we are imaging historic publications, Bionomia where we are linking science specimens to collectors and our open licensing of images on Flickr.

Prosperosity (talk · contribs) started at the Museum as Wikimedian in Residence in January 2021, and progress can be followed on the project dashboard.

Outcomes

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This project concluded at the end of May 2021. 49 articles were created, 273 articles were edited, 882 referenced were added and 12 items were uploaded to Commons. A detailed report on the project is available here.

Goal Outcome
Uploading articles from the Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum into Wikidata Every article of the Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum and Records of the Auckland Museum has a Wikidata entry.

Because of time constraints we didn't get on to uploading data around other Museum publications.

Uploading content to Wikipedia Between January and May 2021, the Wikimedian in Residence added 882 references to the English language Wikipedia, primarily using the Records of the Auckland Museum as a source. All articles between volume 16 and volume 55 (1979-2020) were assessed for how likely useful citations would be found in the works.

Some popular articles which have benefited the most from the project include: Kapiti Island, Manawatāwhi / Three Kings Islands, Māori traditional textiles, Waitākere Ranges, Helensville, First Taranaki War, adze, paper mulberry, Phormium tenax, Paeroa, Drepanacra binocula, Acanthopagrus australis and Ōtāhuhu.

Uploading the Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum to Commons As of May 2021 only five issues of the Records have been uploaded to Commons. Progress was stalled on this as staff recognised there were a number of copyright and cultural permission issues around the bulk upload of this content to Commons. In short, any taonga included in the pages (e.g. a depiction of an ancestor or important cultural work) can by the nature of the CC-By license be used for commercial purposes that the people associated with the subject have no control over. Because of this, the version of the Records uploaded to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (which are pulled through to Commons) need to be individually checked. This process is on-going and instructions on how to upload cleared content has been written up for Museum staff.
Community Events & Engagement Two community events were held, which were pushed back to May because of New Zealand's COVID lockdowns earlier this year.

The first event on 1 May focused on the Women in Red project, where editors could make or improve articles on New Zealand women.

  • 9 participants – a mix of museum staff and people from the community.
  • Created four articles in-person at the event and improved one article from stub class to start class. Online participants created six articles. There is a dashboard for this event.

The second event on 21 May was a workshop for the local Auckland GLAM sector covering how GLAMs can work with Wikipedia for the mutual benefit of both.

  • 22 participants - again a mix of museum staff and local GLAM staff
  • Workshop covered Auckland Museum's work with Wikipedia, an overview of Wikipedia basics and editing, and some editing exercises.

User:Prosperosity has also been regularly attending national online meetups.

We also held a couple of Wikipedia training sessions for Museum staff and recruited one Museum volunteer to work adding references to Wikipedia.

Events

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Blogs

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Reports

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Presentations

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Dashboards

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2020

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As a part of the museum's 2017–2022 Five Year Plan, Auckland War Memorial Museum looked to take a more active approach to engaging with Wikimedia. As a part of this plan, Mike Dickison (Giantflightlessbirds (talk · contribs)) was asked by the museum in 2020 to publish a Wikimedia Strategy for the museum, which discussed the value of the museum integrating collections and information with Wikimedia, developing the Auckland editing community, assessing the museum's engagement with Wikimedia as of early 2020, and provided a list of further recommendations to better optimise how the museum's work with Wikimedia.

The museum Wikimedia strategy was refreshed in 2022 with the Wiki Workplan 2022-2023

Reports

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2019

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Museum medal

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In 2019, Wikipedian and citizen scientist Siobhan Leachman was made a Companion of Auckland War Memorial Museum, due to her work in helping more widely share the museum's collections, by incorporating images from the Auckland Museum collections into Wikipedia articles and actively becoming involved in museum work.

Wikidata

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In September 2019 the Wikidata property "Auckland Museum ID" was created "P7298" Usage of the property can be viewed using the Wikidata Query Service and this query Count of P7298. A basic guide for uploading data into Wikidata can be found here.

Blogs and press releases

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Reports

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Wikimedian-in-Residence 2018

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Mike Dickison at the Auckland War Memorial Museum research library in 2018
Dickison hosting the 21 July 2018 Wikipedia Auckland meetup at Auckland War Memorial Museum research library

Auckland War Memorial Museum hosted Mike Dickison (Giantflightlessbirds (talk · contribs)) as the museum's second Wikipedian–in-Residence in July and August 2018, as a part of the Wikipedian at Large grant, a year long programme where Dickison toured different GLAM institutions across Aotearoa New Zealand.

During Dickison's stay, he set up Wiki-PCAP to improve Pacific Island culture articles with photos and audio/video in collaboration with the Pacific Collection Access Project, added museum type specimens and recently-photographed land vertebrates images to Commons, improved image categorisation of museum-related photographs, ran a local meetup, and a Commons Wikiblitz around the upload of new land vertebrate images to Commons, and led staff training and brown-bag information sessions for museum staff.

Dickison returned to the museum twice as the Wikipedian at Large: once in October 2018 to assist with the Art Week Wikipedia Tutorial, and in February and March 2019 to run a Critter of the Week-themed edit-a-thon.

Events

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Media coverage

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Blogs and press releases

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Reports

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Wikimedian-in-Residence 2017

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Susan Tolich at Women in Science edit-a-thon on 6 August 2017 in Wellington, New Zealand

From June and July 2017, Auckland War Memorial Museum hosted Susan Tolich (Susan Tol (talk · contribs)) as the first official Wikipedian–in-Residence in Aotearoa New Zealand, as a part of her Masters of Museum and Heritage Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Tolich primarily focused on improving coverage of women artists, took part in Women in Red, and engaged with museum staff, members of the public, researchers, and other organisations to encourage contributions to the development of Wikipedia articles and to make the museum's content more publicly accessible.

Tolich also ran a Wikipedia workshop on how museums could use Wikipedia to improve accessibility to their collection and research. This workshop taught basic editing skills, and how to upload images to Commons. She also began bulk uploads of archaeology collection images to WikiCommons.

After the Wikipedian-in-Residence programme, Tolich became a Collection Technician Research Assistant at Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Articles created

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Articles expanded

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Media coverage

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Blogs and press releases

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