Wikipedia:GLAM/Auckland Museum/Projects and Events

2024 Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon


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.

2023–2024 Summer students


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

 * 27 January 2024: Wikipedia Editathon: Trailblazers of Tāmaki Makaurau, an edit-a-thon led by the summer students focusing on improving pages on local figures

Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum grant


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.

Dashboards

 * Auckland Local History WMF Alliance Fund Project dashboard 2023-2024

Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon 20 May 2023


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.

Other events

 * 18 February 2023 meetup, hosted by Auckland War Memorial Museum

Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum (2022)
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.

Events



 * 2 July 2022 meetup, hosted by Auckland War Memorial Museum
 * 28 May 2022 meetup, hosted by Auckland War Memorial Museum
 * 9 April 2022 meetup, hosted by Auckland War Memorial Museum

Dashboards

 * 2022 dashboard
 * Dashboard (mid 2021 - mid-2022)

Auckland Museum lockdown 2.0 project
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


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, Siobhan Leachman , an introduction to WikiSource by , editing sessions led by Mike Dickison and , networking events, and a discussion on making the Wikimedia New Zealand User Group into an incorporated society.

Wikicite Grant - Wikimedian in Residence 2021
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.

started at the Museum as Wikimedian in Residence in January 2021, and progress can be followed on the project dashboard.

Outcomes
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.

Events

 * 21 May 2021 GLAM Development Event: an in-person event targeting Auckland GLAM professionals at Hatchbox, discussing how GLAM sector institutions can integrate institutional content with Wikimedia.
 * 1 May 2021 Women in Red: Edit-a-thon (originally planned for International Women's Day) focused on improving and creating articles on Aotearoa New Zealand women.

Dashboards

 * Wikimedian in Residence at Auckland Museum 2021 dashboard
 * 2021 International Women's Day Edit-a-thon dashboard

2020
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 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

Museum medal
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
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.


 * Collections of Auckland War Memorial Museum
 * Employees of Auckland Museum
 * People with Te Papa and Auckland Museum identifiers

Wikimedian-in-Residence 2018


Auckland War Memorial Museum hosted Mike Dickison 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

 * 2 March 2019 Critter of the Week Wikiblitz: Edit-a-thon focused on image uploads of New Zealand creatures hosted at the Auckland War Memorial Museum research library
 * 6 October 2018 Wikipedia Tutorial: Wikipedia edit-a-thon led by Susan Tolich focused on improving coverage of New Zealand women in art, assisted by Mike Dickison.
 * 18 August 2018 Commons Wikiblitz: Edit-a-thon focused on image uploads
 * 21 July 2018 Wikipedia Auckland meetup, hosted at the Auckland War Memorial Museum research library

Reports

 * New Zealand Wikipedian at Large July 2018 Report

Wikimedian-in-Residence 2017


From June and July 2017, Auckland War Memorial Museum hosted Susan Tolich 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

 * Annie Bonza
 * Josephine and Sybil Mulvany
 * Susan Holmes (fabric artist)
 * Marilyn Sainty
 * Emma Knuckey
 * Ray Shannon
 * Mynes woodfordi

Articles expanded

 * Aunt Daisy
 * Elisabeth Findlay