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 [1] 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.

To develop this work the Museum's Collection Information and Access team commissioned a report 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 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.

January 2024 marked a major milestone for stage one of the project, where all 8 subregions of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland were significantly developed:

As well as stage two, where all 12 regional centres of the Auckland region were developed:

A total of 74 Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland suburb pages were created or vastly improved, with the Māngere Bridge and West Auckland articles rated as Wikipedia good articles and nominated for the Did you know section. Among these suburb pages included additional articles on, heritage buildings, landmarks and geographical sites. Overall, 329 articles were created, 462,000 words were added as well as 6,320 references and 3,223 Wikimedia Commons images were uploaded. Monthly progress was reported here in the This Month in GLAM New Zealand newsletter.

Some other focuses of the project included:

• Auckland Museum Medals project: Creating a page for the medals and improving the coverage of medal recipients and related works or species. For example, for 1999 medal recipient Keith Wise. This included adding structured Wikidata items for all of Wise’s publications, and creating articles on the four taxa named for Wise, and the 33 taxa first described by Wise. Many of the species’ articles presented opportunities for data round-tripping; for species that were first described in the Records of the Auckland Institute & Museum, the original type descriptions could be added (as the museum has released many issues of the Records under a CC-BY license on the BHL), and many holotype images from the collections of Auckland War Memorial Museum could be incorporated.
• Endemic biota of the Auckland Region: Ensuring that all species known to be endemic to the Auckland Region have articles on Wikipedia.
• Reptiles and amphibians of Auckland: Ensuring that all species of reptiles and amphibians present in Auckland have improved pages and more up-to-date information.
• Collections of Auckland Museum on Wikimedia Commons recategorisation project: A long-term project ensuring that content from the Auckland Museum collections already on Wikimedia Commons is better categorised and utilised. Currently focusing on content sourced from the Auckland Museum flickr account, over 2,000 images (including biodiversity specimens, photographs of collections material, and out-of-copyright artworks) are better categorised, and if possible, incorporated into Wikipedia pages, if their inclusion would benefit the page. For paintings and drawings, Wikidata items and Commons categories have been created for any artists who did not already have items, and the Wikidata items link to their Auckland Museum IDs used by Collections Online.

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.

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.

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 the tabs of this project page and through This Month in GLAM and This Month in Education.

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.

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 from15th 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 (Wikiproject Aotearoa Asian Artists)

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.

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 ({{PD-New Zealand}}), and one to indicate that a digital image is a faithful scan of a public-domain original ({{PD-scan}}). 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 {{Institution:Auckland War Memorial Museum}} template should be used, to give a machine-readable attribution to the Museum.

• Images from Auckland Museum

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.

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.