Education/News/November 2024/Auckland Museum Wikipedia Student Programme
Auckland Museum Wikipedia Student Programme
Summary: Auckland Museum in Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city invites a second year of Wikipedia summer students to undertake a research project to enrich Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland histories on Wikipedia. Join us on this 10-week programme where a cohort of five new Wikipedian’s learn about and contribute to the Wikimedia movement.
On November 18th, a cohort of university students were welcomed to Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum as part of the annual Summer Scholar programme. Five students join the Collections & Information Access team for 10 weeks to be inducted into the world of Wikimedia. The five new Wikipedians are being trained and supervised by the Auckland Museum Wikimedian in Residence, Winnieswikiworld. Students bring with them expertise from a range of different tertiary backgrounds including, Law, Art History, Economics, Politics, International Relations, Anthropology, Global Studies and Sociology.
The students were briefed with an ongoing project, Understanding our past- using Wikipedia as a tool to support local history in Tāmaki Makaurau, aiming to produce content to support the new Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum which has a focus on local histories. The content contributed by the students will be valuable, well-researched and referenced articles to support teachers and students in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Students have been encouraged to explore research avenues which reflect their own positionalities in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and to mirror the diversity of histories that are underrepresented on Wikipedia.
The first week of the Wikipedia student programme covered three main training points, The Wikimedia Movement, How Wikipedia Works and Leveraging Wikimedia in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector. The Wikimedia Movement training session covered an introduction to Wikimedia, its origins and growth and the five pillars of Wikipedia. This foundational information helped students understand the reach and impact of Wikimedia platforms as well as highlighting issues such as geographical bias and gender bias. Students were introduced to Wikimedia collaborations and projects such as #visiblewikiwomen and #1lib1ref to get them thinking about community engagement for an edit-a-thon they will organise later in the programme.
The second training session outlined the technical basics of Wikipedia such as article structure, talk pages, edit history, visual editor vs source and sandboxes. Students set up their user pages and even did their first bit of source code editing. Alongside this session students utilised the outreach dashboard training library, working through tutorials and quizzes on the basics of editing. With their technical skills acquired, students took part in a session about leveraging Wikimedia in the GLAM space. This covered how institutions can create a Wikimedia strategy to contribute their knowledge and resources to Wikimedia platforms. Students learnt about how GLAMs can share open images while considering copyright and creative commons licenses. We considered alternative ways GLAMs can contribute and support the movement such as creating authoritative and original content to cite on Wikipedia, making photographs, research and publications available by digitising their collections and using their institutions published resources to improve articles. Students gained a comprehensive understanding of how their Wikipedia projects may fit into a wider movement towards open access knowledge and utilising their connection to museum materials.
The first week of the Wikipedia summer student programme concluded with students starting to research and create their first Wikipedia articles. We are excited to see what the students contribute!