Education/News/February 2023/Alliance Funding for Wikipedia as a school resource in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, New Zealand
Alliance Funding for Wikipedia as a school resource in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, New Zealand
Summary: Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira has received funding from the Wikimedia Foundation Alliance Fund to undertake a project that will enhance local history pages for use in New Zealand's new compulsory history curriculum, as well as train a cohort of student Wikipedia interns.
Late last year staff at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial applied for Wikipedia Alliance Funding to enhance local Auckland suburb pages for use as local history resources in the classroom for the new Aotearoa Histories Curriculum, building on our earlier successful Research Fund project Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum.
The new curriculum, which starts this year, is the first time that there has been a compulsory study of New Zealand history in primary, intermediate, and secondary schools (years 1-10, ages 5-15). This is a huge opportunity for GLAM organisations to expand their audience of school-aged students and their teachers, as it has a strong local history aspect. Alongside understanding the big ideas of Aotearoa New Zealand history and developing critical thinking skills, the students are expected to understand and engage with their local contexts. However, in the research that we earlier undertook, the teachers told us that they were struggling to find suitable local history resources. We believe that Wikipedia, particularly enhanced local suburb pages, can fill this gap, providing detailed historical narratives of local places that are well referenced, illustrated with rich imagery and point to further resources.
The funding we received will pay for our Wikipedian in Residence to continue his work enhancing local suburb pages and towards the end of this year sponsor a cohort of Wikipedia interns to join the Museum’s summer student programme, where we aim to introduce a diverse group of students to Wikipedia editing. We will also be running monthly meetups and edit-a-thons at the Museum for the local community and organising a series of workshops for GLAM professionals and other interested parties.
If you’re interested in the work we are doing please reach out on my talk page or email: jtaylor
aucklandmuseum.com. Otherwise, you can find more information on our Alliance Fund project page, our GLAM-Wiki project page, and we will continue to update the wider Wiki community here and on This Month in GLAM.