Wikipedia:GLAM/Auckland Museum/Wikimedians in Residence

Wikicite Grant - Wikimedian in Residence 2021[edit]

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.

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

The first of two planned meetups took place on 1 May, and the second on 21 May.

Outcomes[edit]

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.

The Wikimedian in Residence's work was featured in this blog post on the Auckland Museum website, and publicised on Facebook and Instagram.

Wikimedians-in-Residence 2017 & 2018[edit]

Activities[edit]

Auckland Museum hosted Wikimedian in Residence Susan Tol (talk · contribs) for five weeks during June/July 2017, and New Zealand Wikipedian-at-Large Giantflightlessbirds (talk · contribs) July to September 2018. Both 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.

Both residencies involved such activities as:

Working with staff, including librarians and curators, to identify areas of Wikipedia and sister projects that could be enriched with resources and knowledge from the Museum's collections.
Developing a policy and workflow for adding to Wikimedia, Wikipedia, etc., in a sustainable and ongoing fashion.
Organising and hosting Wikimedia-related events.
Adding even more resources to Wikimedia Commons.
Being an advocate for open knowledge within the Library and externally.

Themes[edit]

Our objectives were to:

Increase the quality and quantity of coverage of subjects that are currently underrepresented on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, with a particular focus on Māori and Pacific cultural content.
Support the development of open knowledge in New Zealand, by increasing the understanding and recognition of the value of open knowledge and advocating for change.
To support the use of the Wikimedia platforms as important tools for education and learning within the Museum.

Results[edit]

Susan Tol (talk · contribs) ran a Wikipedia workshop on how museums can use Wikipedia to improve accessibility to their collection and research. This workshop also taught basic editing skills, and how to upload images to Commons. She also began bulk uploads of archaeology collection images to WikiCommons.
Giantflightlessbirds (talk · contribs) organised a local meetup, and a Commons Wikiblitz around the upload of new land vertebrate images to Commons. He also created Wiki-PCAP, a collaboration with the Pacific Collection Access Project, and ran staff training and brown-bag information sessions.