Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Making local history more accessible for teachers in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Prosperosity - Marty Blayney, Auckland Museum Wikimedian in Residence
Susan_Tol - Susan Tolich, Collection Technician, Research SupportThis is an automatically generated Meta-Wiki page. The page was copied from Fluxx, the grantmaking web service of Wikimedia Foundation where the user has submitted their application. Please do not make any changes to this page because all changes will be removed after the next update. Use the discussion page for your feedback. The page was created by CR-FluxxBot.
Applicant information[edit]
A. Organization type
- Mission-aligned organization
B. Organization name
- Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum
E. Do you have an account on a Wikimedia project?
- Yes
E1. Please provide the main Wikimedia Username (required) and Usernames of people related to this proposal.
- Jetaynz - James Taylor, Online Collections Information & Partnerships Manager
Prosperosity - Marty Blayney, Auckland Museum Wikimedian in Residence
Susan_Tol - Susan Tolich, Collection Technician, Research Support
G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?
- Applied previously and did receive a grant
H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?
- Yes
- H1. Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?
- James Searle Say Foundation
Internet NZ National Services Te Paerangi – Te Papa Pro Natura Foundation Japan Stevenson Foundation Tennyson Trust Auckland Museum Institute Auckland Shell Club Levingston Cooke C&L Gregory Trust PEW Carolyn Werner Earthquake Commission Dr James Fawcett Watercare Ministry of Education Auckland Uniservices Douglas Goodfellow Charitable Trust Joyce Fisher Charitable Trust GIFT / Foundation North Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment Endeavour Fund
- H2. Please state the size of these grants from the following options.
- Other
- H3. What type of organization (s) did you receive grants from?
- Government, National NGO, International NGO, Endowment funds
- H4. What percentage of your program budget do other funders contribute to?
- Less than 30%
1. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- No
1a. Fiscal organization name.
- N/A
2. Are you legally registered?
- Yes
3. What type of organization are you?
- Non profit organisation
4. What is your organization or group's mission and how does it align with the Wikimedia movement?
- Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s oldest museums with one of the largest collections in the Southern Hemisphere spanning most cultures and time periods. The Museum’s vision is “enriching lives, inspiring discoveries, connecting through shared stories of people, lands and seas.” It is committed to making knowledge freely accessible and its collection imagery and data openly licensed and has a long involvement and shared values with WMF platforms.
5. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)
https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/ https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/discover/collections/partnerships https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/discover/collections/partnerships/wikipedia https://twitter.com/aucklandmuseum https://www.instagram.com/aucklandmuseum/ https://www.facebook.com/AucklandMuseum/
Grant proposal[edit]
6. Please state the title of your proposal.
- Making local history more accessible for teachers in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
9. Where will this proposal be implemented?
- New Zealand
10. Indicate if it is a local, international, or regional proposal and if it involves several countries?
- Local
10a. If you have answered international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.
10b. Are there any specific sub-regions or areas where your proposal will be implemented?
- The main reason for focusing at a local level on Auckland is because of the potential impact due to the city's large and multi-cultural population relative to the rest of New Zealand. Auckland is New Zealand’s largest and most diverse city, with 1.5 million people, nearly one third of the total population. Significantly, for our focus around education, Auckland also has 1/3rd of all children and young people in New Zealand, with a high school aged population of around 250,000.
Despite its size, the city’s in-person Wikipedia editing community is not strong, and there have only been sporadic meet-ups since 2006, but the city has the potential for a large, diverse and younger Wikipedia community corresponding to its demographics.
Finally, the Museum's core funding comes from the Auckland City Council and commercial revenue. While the Museum takes a national leadership role in the culture and heritage sector, day to day activities and focus lie within the Auckland provincial region.
11. What is the challenge or problem you are addressing and why is this important?
- In 2023 a new compulsory Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum rolls out across the country. This new curriculum is structured around three ideas “Understand: the big ideas of Aotearoa New Zealand Histories”, “Know: national, rohe (tribal) and local contexts” and “Do: thinking critically about the past and interpreting stories about it”. We have been investigating ways we can engage with this curriculum with online resources, particularly around the “Know” component and engage at scale with the over 200,000 high school students and teachers in Auckland who will be learning about their local histories. Last year we applied for a WMF research grant to test our ideas about the feasibility of using Wikipedia in local high school classes by talking to teachers themselves about their needs. The research was completed in April this year and the key findings were:
1 - Most participants saw Wikipedia as a reliable resource for national New Zealand history content. 2 -The question of reliability was a concern when it came to accessing local histories on Wikipedia. 3 - Teachers overwhelmingly trusted the information on local history in the Auckland Museum as reliable and accurate. 4 - 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 knowledge that is supported by reliable evidence and unverified narratives.
Despite the generally positive perception of Wikipedia amongst the surveyed teachers, the research also surfaced the problem that we are seeking to address, which is around the quality/reliability of local historical information on Wikipedia (finding 2). This corresponds to a more general issue around resourcing for teachers and the new curriculum which we have gleaned from teachers in various workshops around the curriculum over the past two years. Teachers are confident in the “Understand” and “Know” parts for big national topics which are well covered in various online resources, but it is local history and the teaching of place, cities and suburbs that teachers are not so confident in teaching, nor are they able to easily find suitable online resources.
We believe that we can use Wikipedia to address this gap in local history resources, and improve the quality of information on Wikipedia to make it a trusted resource for local teachers. It would bring a new audience of teachers and students to Wikipedia, and would also allow the GLAM sector to engage at scale with the new curriculum by focusing their resources on updating and enhancing local history pages that are available for all. In doing so we can further enhance the local content about New Zealand’s largest city and diversify the knowledge that is available on Wikipedia. We are proposing to leverage the high trust that the research found in the Museum’s information (finding 3) to tackle the issue of the reliability of local content on Wikipedia (finding 2).
12. What is the main objective of your proposal? Please state why you think partnering with Wikimedia Movement helps to achieve this objective?
- This main objective is editing and enhancing Auckland local history content on Wikipedia to make it a trusted resource for use in the classroom. Wikipedia helps to amplify the reach of our open access collections and expertise and is also an increasingly used resource in classrooms. By undertaking an editing project we can engage at scale with the curriculum, making knowledge available on a platform teachers and students regularly use.
13. Describe your main strategies to achieve this objective?
- We intend to address this problem with a year-long project that focuses on training, editing and content enhancement with a secondary focus on engaging both local GLAM institutions and the local Wikipedia community by hosting in-person events and edit-a-thons.
The primary project workstream will be focused on Wikipedia local history editing/content enhancement, employing a Project Co-ordinator, who will work with and be supported by Museum staff, to train a cohort of 7 short-term 10 week tertiary student Wikimedians in Residence to enhance, edit and create Wikipedia pages relating to local Auckland history, empowering this cohort to become a new generation of Wikipedia editors.
The project will focus on updating local history Wikipedia pages. Suburbs will be a key initial focus as teachers will be able to use these pages as starting points for teaching local history along with detailed articles on the major sub-regions of Auckland. We will enhance these pages with rich histories, covering Māori settlement and occupation, the colonial period and later developments in the 20th century, illustrating the articles with ours and other Auckland GLAMs open content and references to print and digitised sources. We will combine contemporary historical scholarship with other secondary sources to ensure a range of perspectives are included, re-balancing the predominantly European/Pākehā history that makes up much of the currently available content to ensure it reflects one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world. To obtain maximum impact the project will initially focus on those suburbs that have the city’s largest schools, ensuring that the work undertaken by the project reaches a wide school audience. The final stage of the project will be to improve the “Auckland” and “History of Auckland” pages, based on the new knowledge and research gained over the course of the year.
While content editing and enhancement is the main focus of activity, there will also be an engagement and in-person workstream (COVID situation dependent). We want to encourage other GLAM organisations in the region to take part and will assist them to share their digitised collections. We will also continue to build on our work with the local and national Wikipedia editing community. As part of the project we intend to hold regular monthly edit-a-thons at the Museum’s research library.
We will also build on the relationships with teachers that we have developed during the research project to validate the work that is being done. We will follow up with them, checking in regularly to ensure the content that is being created is meeting their needs.
In parallel to this, James Taylor, has been certified to run “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” workshops, so these will take place as a complementary strand of work in the second half of this year, exploring the use of Wikipedia in the classroom more generally around media and information literacy.
14. Are you running any in-person events or activities?
- Yes
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/109CGCtNzFYPlHNYpWo6hzl7rbAO1waU5w9Z233fTJpQ/edit?usp=sharing
15. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified content knowledge gaps?
- Content Gender gap, Age (regency) , Geography, Important Topics (topics considered to be of impact or important in the specific context), Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial
16. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or thematic focus.
- Education, Climate Change and sustainability, Open Technology, Diversity
17. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select all categories that apply.
- Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background, Socioeconomic status, Age
18. Please tell us more about your target participants.
- Our direct target participants are the cohort of tertiary students who will each take part in ten week Wikipedian in Residence studentships. Our intention is to pay them NZ$6500 each (the same as our annual summer studentships and University of Auckland summer studentships). This will mean that we can attract students from a diverse range of backgrounds who can take part without financial burdens prohibiting them from applying. We will work with tertiary partners in Auckland who we have strong relationships with (University of Auckland, AUT) to advertise the studentships as well as our usual recruitment channels. We can also tap into wider networks via our Pacific Advisory Group and Taumata-a-Iwi and aspire to have a cohort that includes a range of participants with Māori, Pasifika, Asian and Pakeha/European backgrounds and students from subjects such as History, Māori Studies, Pacific Studies, Art History and Sociology. By focusing on the intersection of the museum's project goals with the students' personal interests or backgrounds we hope to empower a new generation of passionate life-long Wikipedia editors.
Retaining the participants after they have completed their studentships may prove difficult, and we will consider this as one of the crucial learnings of the project. We hope that by providing a positive, meaningful experience they will see the benefit of continuing to edit Wikipedia. More concretely, we will encourage their attendance at the monthly meet-ups that will be held at the Museum to try to sustain their interest. We can also use this project as an opportunity to experiment with the format and content of these meetups, enabling the students to lead them and choose topics that will be focused on.
Local teachers and students will be indirect participants of this project, as this is the group that we intend to provide resources for. As mentioned above we will check in with a group of teachers to gauge the relevance of the content that is being edited and created, validating the work that we do. While the final form of this is to be determined, we may take multiple approaches using a combination of online surveys, one on one meetings or set up an informal advisory panel and check in with them regularly.
19. Do you have plans to work with other Wikimedia communities, groups or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?
- Yes
19a. If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.
- Museum staff have strong relationships, both offline and online with members of the local and national Wikimedia communities, following a number of years of work on various WMF platforms. We host regular meetups for the local Auckland community at the Museum Library, and staff members have been regular attendees at the Aotearoa Online Meetup.
We have discussed this project informally with a number of members of the community, and once it has been submitted we will place notices on relevant Wiki noticeboards, including:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_Zealand_Wikipedians%27_notice_board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Auckland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard
Alongside this a member of the project team will attend the next Aotearoa Online Meetup on 1 May to share the results of the research project and this proposed project.
19b. If no, please tell us the reasons why it has not been possible to make these connections.
- N/A
20. Will you be working with other external non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?
- Yes
20a. If yes, please describe these partnerships.
- As mentioned earlier, we aspire to work with other local GLAM organisations in the Auckland region. The purpose of this is to encourage them to engage with the Wikipedia movement, and to promote the benefits of using Wikipedia as a means of providing resources for the upcoming Histories Curriculum. These will be informal partnerships, where we can offer the Project Co-ordinator for training workshops with staff and potentially hold edit-a-thons at their institutions. This builds on work we have done previously for our Wikicite funded project, where we offered an afternoon workshop for local GLAM professionals.
20a. If yes, indicate sharing of resources from these partners (in kind support, grants, donations, payments).
- The level of resource will depend on whether local GLAM organisations are interested in engaging with us in this project. There will be no financial resource involved, as the culture and heritage sector is currently operating in a COVID constrained financial environment. If other organisations do want to get involved, it will be around in-kind benefits, such as staff time, use of space for edit-a-thons, or making openly licenced content available via Wikimedia Commons.
21. Please tell us how your organization is structured.
- Auckland Museum was founded in 1852. The Museum uses both titles; Auckland War Memorial Museum is used for all formal communications such as annual reports.
In 1996, the Auckland War Memorial Museum Act, transferred the assets and Governance of the Auckland Institute and Museum to the Auckland Museum Trust Board. The Act sets out the obligations of the Board and provides for sustained funding of the Museum by a levy on Auckland ratepayers. It also requires the Museum to actively supplement public funding with commercial activities. One of the Board's duties is to establish broad lines of policy for the guidance of the Director.
The Act provides for a ten-Member Board to be appointed by Auckland Council (five Members), the Auckland Museum Institute (four Members) and by the Māori advisory committee Taumata-ā-Iwi (one Member). The Taumata-ā-Iwi is responsible for the provision of advice and assistance to the Trust Board in a series of matters set out in the Act. They act in a trustee role in representing the interests of Iwi and advising the Trust Board on matters of custodial policy and guardianship of Māori taonga of whatever kind and tribal sources.
Operationally, the Museum is split into six directorates, Collections and Research; Finance and Enterprise; Public Experience; Marketing, Communications and External Affairs; People and Organisation and Māori and Pacific Development, each headed by a Director who sits on the Executive Team lead by the Chief Executive.
22. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
- The project will be based out of Auckland Museum’s Collection Information and Access (CIA) department, part of the Museum’s Collection and Research directorate, whose staff are specialists in the areas of online and on-site access, digital partnerships, research, data, open access and copyright. The team manages the Museum’s Research Library, and two major research platforms Collections Online and Online Cenotaph, and is also responsible for collection digitisation and the Museum’s research strategy. The core group of project staff listed below have worked closely on the Museum’s open access and Wikipedia related work over a number of years. We will also be able to draw on support from colleagues in other areas, including collection managers and curators in the wider Collections and Research directorate and specialists from the Learning and Public Programmes department and Visitor and Market Research department.
Adam Moriarty - Head of Collection Information & Access, Auckland Museum (Project Sponsor) James Taylor - Online Collections & Information Partnership Manager, Auckland Museum (Project Manager) Marty Blayney - Wikimedian in Residence, Auckland Museum (Project Support) Susan Tolich - Collection Technician Research Support, Auckland Museum (Project Support) Dr Mark Sheehan, Researcher, Auckland Museum & Victoria University of Wellington (Project Support) Project Co-ordinator - to be recruited
23. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.
Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation[edit]
24. What do you hope to learn from this proposal?
- We want to build on our previous research grant, particularly in the area of the use of Wikipedia in the classroom as a trusted resource. The best way to judge this is in the form of a series of questions that guide the project and that we can report on as the project progresses and use as qualitative measures of success and learning at the conclusion of the project. Below are a series of questions which will be measured by observation combined with some of the standard metrics collected in the next section below and in regularly engaging with our direct (student cohort) and indirect (teachers) project participants.
Can we improve the quality of information on Wikipedia so that teachers use it regularly as a resource?
Can we improve the quality of information on Wikipedia by recruiting tertiary students as editors?
What level of training is required for a tertiary student to be able to competently edit Wikipedia starting from scratch?
What is a realistic editing output for a “newbie” editor at the completion of a ten week studentship?
Will student cohort editors stay involved after paid studentship is completed? How can we ensure they remain engaged as Wikipedia editors?
Can we expand the reach of GLAM open collections with targeted editing projects?
What support do other local GLAM organisations require to work with Wiki platforms?
Is Wikipedia a viable education platform?
Can working with Wikipedia assist GLAMs to engage with education curriculums at scale?
Core Metrics[edit]
25. Enter a description of the metric and a number in the target field. If the metric does not apply to you, enter N/A for not applicable.
| Core metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | Paid project participants, 7x 10 week studentships and 1x Project Co-ordinator | 8 |
| Number of editors | Same as above. 7 students will be new editors, the Project Co-ordinator will be experienced. | 8 |
| Number of organizers | Project co-ordinator and Project Manager. They will be supported by other Museum staff as required. | 2 |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | For the seven students: 70 articles created, 350 articles edited & improved, 350 references added, 210 images added
For the co-ordinator: 50 articles created, 250 articles edited/improved, 250 references added, 150 images added Total: 120 articles created, 600 articles edited and improved; 600 references added; 360 images added |
1320 |
| Wikimedia Commons | For the seven students: 70 articles created, 350 articles edited & improved, 350 references added, 210 images added
For the co-ordinator: 50 articles created, 250 articles edited/improved, 250 references added, 150 images added Total: 120 articles created, 600 articles edited and improved; 600 references added; 360 images added |
360 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
25a. If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation. (optional)
- We also intend to hold at least 12x museum events at the Museum library with at least 5x participants from the local Wikipedia community, and at least 2x workshops for GLAM professionals from the Auckland region.
Finally, as a measure of the success of targeted editing projects, we will aim to grow our Wikipedia audience by 10% over the year of the project (approximately 3 million views).
26. What other information will you be collecting to learn about the impact of your work? (optional)
- As a requirement of completion of the studentship we will ask the student Wikimedians to write a blog about their experience, as well as a short report detailing the editing work they have undertaken.
We will also collect data from the teachers that we work with to ascertain effectiveness of resources. This will likely take a mixed form of online surveys and one on one or group discussions.
27. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?
- The two main tools for this project will be:
GLAMorgan - this captures the views of our open images available on Wikimedia Commons. We use data from this as an input to our monthly Wikipedia statistics which are publicly available on the Museum website.
Program and Events Dashboards - which captures information about editors' work on Wiki platforms and aggregates them in an easy to use and view dashboard. We use this to measure our annual and project specific Wiki editing activity.
28. How do you hope to share these results so that others can learn from them?
- Make a short presentation of the experience, Create a training workshop to show others what we learned, Share results on social media, Share results with our communities, Participate in one on one peer sharing session with other grantees, Develop learning material for other users, Share it on Meta-Wiki, Other
- Presentations at national conferences, such as the National Digital Forum.
Blog articles on "Diff"
Regular updates in "This month in GLAM"
Attendence at Aoteroa Online meetup to keep local community abreast of the project.
Museum blogs and social media.
Financial Proposal[edit]
29. What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency.
- 141350 NZD
30. What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
- 96000 USD
31. & 32. Please provide a budget for the amount of funding requested.
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bFKPeo_H5R-YFixyMp-cXeJ3EzV00IprSveCdHzLSI4/edit?usp=sharing
33. What do you do to make sure there is a good management of funds?
- We have a team of Development Executives that guide Museum staff through all phases of externally funded projects, from funding application, reporting, financial management, and final completion. The project has a Development Executive assigned to assist with this project.
The Museum staff that are involved with this project have experience delivering successful projects, and in the last 18 months have completed two Wikimedia Foundation funded projects.
The Project Manager will regularly check in with Regional WMF staff to update them on the status of the project, and will complete all reporting requirements on time and as required.
34. How will you contribute towards creating a supportive environment for participants using the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy?
- The Museum has held a number of on-site Wikipedia events and these have been guided by the rules around UCOC and Friendly Space policy. Museum staff are also expected to abide by core values of Manaakitanga (hospitality). There are also provisions in staff contracts around conduct and professional behavior.
35. Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.
- Other public document(s):
Final message[edit]
By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.
36. We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
- Yes
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