Wikipedia:GLAM/Auckland Museum



In 2020 Auckland Museum began a more active strategic approach to its engagement with Wikimedia, Wikipedia and Wikidata, with a new Wiki Workplan that enables it to work towards the organisation's Five Year Strategic Plan goals to “reach more people” and “stretch thinking” by leveraging the Museum’s open collections and the wider Wiki ecosystem.

By doing this the Museum is seeking to increase engagement on various Wikimedia platforms focusing on local and global communities, both online and on-site. The end goal is to pivot towards a strategic approach that contributes Museum collections and expertise to increase engagement and contributes to Wikipedia's goals of making knowledge free, open and accessible for all.

An Auckland Museum Wikipedia Strategy
To develop this work the Museum's Collection Information and Access team commissioned a by User:Giantflightlessbirds as we sought input from the Wiki community itself about how to best engage with the Wiki ecosystem. The report covered a number of areas: the coverage of museum building, staff and collections on Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons image uploads; Wikimedia Commons licensing; Wikidata engagement; Museum research and publications; Museum photography and documentation, and the relationship with the Wikimedia community. In total there were 56 recommendations.

The Museum's annual Workplans have been informed by both the recommendations of this report and research into Wikipedia and Wikidata best practice. Previous years Workplans can be found here.

Auckland Museum Wiki Workplan 2020-21
The last two years of our Wiki Workplan (20-21 and 21-22) have been affected by the COVID pandemic, particularly the lockdowns that staff at the Museum experienced during 2020 and 2021. This resulted in us pivoting away from in-person engagement to supporting Museum staff with work they could do from home and undertaking other activities within various COVID restriction frameworks.

Despite this, we managed to complete several actions from 20-21, including hosting the second ever Aotearoa New Zealand Wikicon in July 2021 and sporadic meet-ups. Staff at the Museum continued to edit and enhance Wikipedia pages with content sourced from Museum research and open collection imagery. We also created ISA Tool campaigns to provide work for Visitor Hosts who we unable to work at the Museum due to lockdowns. In total 11 campaigns were run, and 15 participants added 34,136 tags to Museum content on Wikimedia Commons. Staff also contributed to Wikipedia requested photographs in Auckland, adding 144 photos of local schools, places and suburbs. In all 175 pages were created, over 1600 pages were edited and 382 photos uploaded to commons during the lockdown.

We also successfully undertook two Wikimedia Foundation funded projects. The first of these was a Wikicite funded project which funded a Wikimedian in Residence (who has since become a part time member of staff). This project integrated Museum research from the Records of Auckland Museum into Wikipedia articles alongside adding bibliographic details to Wikidata. The learnings from this project was shared with the Wiki community including the first Te Reo Māori blog published on Diff.

The other project investigated how we could use Wikipedia as a resource for the upcoming compulsory Aotearoa NZ Histories Curriculum, and settled on editing and enhancing Auckland suburb articles that can be used as resources for teachers and students in the local history component of the new curriculum. To test whether this would be feasible, we applied for and undertook a WMF Research project from May 2021-March 2022 examining New Zealand’s teachers attitudes to the use of Wikipedia in secondary school classrooms. With positive results from this research, we have since successfully applied for Alliance Funding, which will enable us to concentrate on local history and suburb editing as well as train a cohort of student editors. This will be a major focus in 2022-2023.

Auckland Museum Wiki Workplan 2022-23
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.

We plan to restart monthly in person and online meetups hosted at the Museum and will be focusing on work that contributes to our project Understanding our past: using Wikipedia as a tool to support local history in Tamaki Makaurau.

Workplan Actions 2022-23
Engaging with the community:

• Restart monthly edit-a-thons for the Auckland Wikipedia community. These will be a mix of in person and online events, focusing on particular themes or skill-sharing.

• Support local and national Wikipedians with editing projects

• Support local and national GLAMs engaging with Wikipedia, including running at least one GLAM/Wikipedia workshop as part of our Alliance Funded project.

• Train a cohort of new student Wikipedia editors as part of our Alliance Funded project.

Enhancing content on Wikipedia:

• Create and edit articles based on to do lists on the Museum GLAM-Wiki project page

• Incorporate Museum related publications and research into relevant articles and add bibliographic information to Wikidata

• Creating and improving articles on scientific specimens held in the Museum’s collections

• Enhance local history and Auckland Suburb pages as part of the Museum’s Wikimedia Foundation Alliance funded project

Enriching content available on Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and other Wiki projects :

• Add images to Wikimedia Commons of specimen articles which lack them.

• Add relevant images from books digitised as part of the BHL NZ Project to Wikipedia Commons.

• Contribute images for Critter of the Week

• Add images related to Auckland suburbs, either from the Museum’s collections or take photographs of relevant sites and upload to Commons for our Alliance Fund project

• Add images to Wikipedia Commons used in Records of Auckland Museum, if they are out of copyright or have CC-BY licenses.

• Upload books digitised for the BHL NZ project to Wikisource

• Upload transcriptions undertaken for the BHL NZ project to Wikisource

Since 1852, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira has been amassing a world-class, encyclopaedic collection, which now comprises some three million objects and counting—each telling a story that helps interpret, understand, and illuminate the history of Aotearoa and its people.


 * Collections Online provides access to collection records, 250,000+ images, and a number of short articles on topics relevant to the collections.
 * An API provides programmatic access; User:Fæ has written some useful relevant technical notes on batch-uploading to Commons.
 * Online Cenotaph is biographical database established to commemorate those who have served in the armed forces for New Zealand. It contains information on more than 140,000 people.

Copyright
Images in Auckland Museum's collections can fall under a range of Copyright restrictions. If an image is to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons it needs to be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) and have a download button, or be Public Domain/Out of Copyright. If the image does not meet these requirements it should not be uploaded to Commons. "No known copyright restrictions" is not necessarily sufficient.

The Museum has some guidelines for using their images that go into detail regarding the various copyright statements you might encounter.

Wikimedia Commons has a public domain metadata template for New Zealand, and one to indicate that a digital image is a faithful scan of a public-domain original. These should be used together when uploading a Public Domain scan.

In the "source" field of any Commons upload of a collection item from the Museum, the template should be used, to give a machine-readable attribution to the Museum.

Wikimedia Commons category

 * Images from Auckland Museum

Gallery
Wikipedia is different from most other social-media channels used by the Auckland Museum. Wikipedia is a community-written encyclopedia and members of the public are free to write about Museum objects, current and former employees, or the Museum itself. Being an encyclopedia, Wikipeida is a tertiary source that does not publish original information (i.e. information for which no independent secondary source exists). Wikipedia contributors, including staff, do not own their contributions; contributions may be contested or changed.

These guidelines communicate the Museum’s expectations of staff engaging in editing Wikipedia articles and provide a public-facing explanation of the editing methodology of Museum staff, and also acknowledge that the institution is aware of and dealing with any potential conflicts of interest in (paid) staff editing.

The guidelines were developed using as a template the draft United States National Archives WikiProject's internal guidelines, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. These guidelines are published under the same license.

Policy statement

 * 1) Staff participate in Wikipedia on an equal footing with all other editors by using individual rather than institutional accounts.
 * 2) Where staff are contributing Museum assets (i.e., digitised images of collection items that are in copyright, or photographs taken by the Museum) to Wikimedia Commons, they must: have Museum authorisation to release the specific files; use the appropriate license; and apply the Museum's template.
 * 3)  Museum staff must disclose their affiliation with the Museum on their user page before editing. Templates are available on the Museum’s Participants project page.
 * 4) If Museum staff edit articles about the Museum as an institution, other users may perceive a conflict of interest. Simple factual changes (e.g.: personnel updates or outdated statistics) may likely be made without contention, but more substantive changes should be proposed first using discussion pages or other fora.
 * 5) Additions to articles must be verifiable. This means that independent media or secondary sources should be cited whenever possible.
 * 6) When editing articles, an impartial voice should be maintained. Museum staff must remember they are writing an encyclopedia, not speaking for the Museum.