Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Understanding our past:using Wikipedia as a tool to support local history in Tāmaki Makaurau/Midpoint Report
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-07-15T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Wikimedia Alliances Fund
Report type: Midterm
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General information[edit]
This form is for organizations receiving Wikimedia Community Funds (General Support) or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their mid-term learning and results. See the Wikimedia Alliances Fund application if you want to review the initial proposal.
- Name of Organization: Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum
- Title of Proposal: Understanding our past: using Wikipedia as a tool to support local history in Tāmaki Makaurau
- Amount awarded: 32995 USD, 52160 NZD
- Amount spent: 8781.2 NZD
Part 1 Understanding your work[edit]
1. Briefly describe how your strategies and activities proposed were implemented and if any changes to what was proposed are worth highlighting?
- The main work we have undertaken for the first half of the project has been editing, which has involved creating and enhancing relevant Wikipedia pages.
We began by focusing on geographical subregions of Auckland. Over time, this tactic shifted to creating 1-2 articles on major suburbs/towns in each subregion, then using these as the basis for the subregion articles.
In March we reassessed which suburbs were the highest need, by tallying the number of school students found in each area. This tactic helped identify seven key suburbs with over 7,000 students: Manurewa (with over 10,000 students), Māngere and Papatoetoe in South Auckland, Henderson in West Auckland, Epsom in Central Auckland, Howick in East Auckland and Takapuna on the North Shore. This ensures our editing work is of value for a wide audience of teachers and students.
The secondary part of our project was organising meetups and workshops. We have only run one workshop, where the Wikipedian in Residence led a session on local history editing at the Wellington Wikicon. The remaining workshops will be held in the second half of the year.
Our in-person and online meetups have been less successful, with small attendances, so we are re-thinking how we will run these in the second half of the year. These are likely to be more thematic or skills based, rather than a general meetup.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you feel are being effective in achieving your goals?
- As mentioned above, focusing on the regions and suburbs where there are the most students will enable a wider audience for the work we are doing, and ensure that these Wikipedia pages are a useful and relevant starting point for the study of their local history.
We also believe that changing the focus of our monthly meetups from general meetups to a bi-monthly, or less regular edit-a-thon with a more defined focus, i.e., around particular themes, or skill sharing or development should bring in more participants. An example of this is the most recent edit-a-thon we ran in conjunction with Women in Architecture, which had 23 participants in person, and editors also working remotely in two other cities. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Auckland_20)
3. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered so far?
- For the editing of local history and suburb pages we are finding that there are few appropriate local history resources. And for the resources that do exist they are often older books that need to be considered in the context of other resources to ensure a diversity of experience and relevance. For instance, there are few local histories written from indigenous and migrant perspectives. To counteract this, we have drawn from Treaty of Waitangi settlement reports, which draw from Māori customary and traditional knowledge about areas.
Related to this we have found that there are stark differences in areas where people write about history (typically wealthier European suburbs with 100+ years history), and places where most Aucklanders live today.
There are also gaps across time periods which compound these issues. There is detailed content about 1840 to the 1950s, followed by almost no information for the second half of the twentieth century and early 2000s and 2010s. This is a significant issue for areas with significantly different demographics compared to the 1970s, and means that the wave of post-war migration, and the diversification of the Auckland population has little literature that can be used in Wikipedia articles.
As mentioned above we have also struggled with engagement for our monthly meet-ups and are re-thinking our approach in this area.
4. Please describe how different communities are participating and being informed about your work.
- We have used multiple methods and forums for different communities to participate and be informed with the work to date with the project.
For the local New Zealand editing community, the Wikipedian in Residence ran a workshop with editors at the Wellington Wikicon in March. Museum staff also attend the monthly Aotearoa Online meetup, and the Project Manager has met with committee members from the Aotearoa New Zealand User Group to update them on progress.
The wider movement has been informed about our work via monthly updates in "This Month in GLAM", and bi-monthly updates in the Education-Wiki newsletter.
The local GLAM community and representatives from the Ministry of Education were informed about progress in the project at a workshop on the new history curriculum, organised by the Ministry for local GLAMs, held this past week at the Museum.
The Project Manager has also submitted abstracts to present at this year's National Digital Forum and the New Zealand Historical Association Conference, both in November this year. He has also had a paper accepted for Wikimania in Singapore in August. These presentations will cover a range of communities.
In the next month we will also be working directly with teacher advisors, gaining their feedback on the project.
5. Please share reflections on how your efforts are helping to engage participants and/or build content, particularly for underrepresented groups.
- At this stage in the project the main work we have done in this area is significantly enhancing the Wikipedia article on the South Auckland region. This is is a diverse area of Auckland with many state houses and a large population of Māori, Pasifika and other immigrants. The enhancements that have been done to it ensures that this significant area is now thoroughly represented on Wikipedia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Auckland) As previously mentioned we also now have a significantly increased coverage of suburbs, ensuring that a wide audience of students have enhanced access to content for the areas where they live.
In terms of engaging participants, many of the people who took part in the Women in Architecture edit-a-thon were newbie editors.
We also have our student cohort joining us for the Summer Studentship programme, from November this year and we hope to recruit a diverse range of students which will enable us to plug some of the existing content gaps, particularly around Māori and Pasifika content.
6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What have you learned so far about these areas during this period?
- The learning questions we submitted in our proposal cover the enhancement of Wikipedia for use in the classroom by teachers and students and also around the student editors. We will be working with teacher advisors in second half of project to ascertain the utility of the work we have done.
We have budgeted for an evaluation of the summer student programme and the overall project, so we will be able to reflect on these initiatives in more detail in our final report.
For reference, the questions were:
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?
Can we expand the reach of GLAM open collections with targeted editing projects?
Can working with Wikipedia assist GLAMs to engage with education curriculums at scale?
Is Wikipedia a viable education platform?
7. What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your work?
- We have completed 3/4 of the Wikipedian in Residence's editing for the project. The work to complete is the two remaining major sub-regions, after which we will focus on the remaining suburbs with the largest population of students.
The student cohort will come on board in November and finish mid February.
We will be working with an advisory group of teachers, testing the utility of the content enhancements we have undertaken.
There are three further events we will organise.
Part 2: Metrics[edit]
8a. Open and additional metrics data.
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
8b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | Paid participants (4x 10 week studentships, 1x Wikipedian in Residence) | 5 | 1 | At this stage we have the Wikipedian in Residence working on the project. The Summer Students will be recruited later this year. | n/a |
| Number of editors | Same as above | 5 | 1 | See comment above. | |
| Number of organizers | Wikipedian in Residence and Project Manager. They will be supported by other Museum staff as required. | 2 | 2 | Both the Project Manager and Wikipedian in Residence are actively engaged in work on the project. |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | For the Wikipedians in Residence: 30 articles created, 100 articles edited, 250 references added.
For the 4 students: 40 articles created, 40 articles edited and improved, 300 references added. |
760 | 6405 | The Wikipedian in Residence has done an outstanding job on editing for the first half of the project, with 255 articles created, 1800 articles edited, and 4350 references added. | We are using the WMF Outreach Dashboard to track work related to the project - https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Auckland_War_Memorial_Museum/Understanding_our_past-using_Wikipedia_as_a_tool_to_support_local_history |
| Wikimedia Commons | For the Wikipedians in Residence: 150 images added.
For the 4 students: 100 images added. |
250 | 1198 | 1198 images have been added to relevant Wikipedia pages. | We are using the WMF Outreach Dashboard to track work related to the project - https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Auckland_War_Memorial_Museum/Understanding_our_past-using_Wikipedia_as_a_tool_to_support_local_history |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
9. Are you having any difficulties collecting data to measure your results?
- No, the Outreach Dashboard is suitable for this reporting. There will be qualitative data sought in the second half of the project from the teacher advisory group, as well as during the learning and evaluation phases which has been budgeted for.
10. Are you collaborating and sharing learning with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?
- Yes
10a. Please describe how you have already shared them and if you would like to do more sharing, and if so how?
- See our answer to question 4 above about how we have shared the work we are doing. This includes running a workshop at the Wellington Wikicon, meeting with committee members from the Aotearoa NZ Wikipedia User Group and regular attendance at the Aotearoa Online Meetup.
The project will be further shared in the second half of this year at the National Digital Forum, NZ Historical Association Conference and Wikimania.
11. Documentation of your work process, story, and impact.
- Below there is a section to upload files, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g. communications materials, blog posts, compelling quotes, social media posts, etc.). This can be anything that would be useful to understand and show your learning and results to date (e.g., training material, dashboards, presentations, communications material, training material, etc).
- Below is an additional field to type in link URLs.
There will be training materials and further documentation to share that will arise from work undertaken in the second half of this year.
Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance[edit]
12. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
- 8781.2
13. Local currency type
- NZD
14. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Provide links to your financial reporting documents.
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TJ70ukMGnWcB81YXn5mcHGEC3JijVSiddAJ4mXyRx7M/edit?usp=sharing
15. Based on your implementation and learning to date, do you have any plans to make changes to the budget spending?
- No
15a. Please provide an explanation on how you hope to adjust this.
- N/A
16. We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being a grantee has been so far.
- While we are at the mid point of the project we have mostly focused on the editing aspect of the project. In the coming months the project work will pivot to the summer studentships as well as well as sharing our work with a range of communities.
We are greatly appreciative of the Wikimedia Foundation's support for this work, and in informal discussions with teachers, Ministry of Education officials and other GLAM staff they have been excited and highly supportive of the work we have done.
We are also really looking forward to sharing the work we have done with the global Wikipedia community at Wikicon in August and believe that we are making solid progress towards the projects overall goals of enhancing Wikipedia to make it a trusted educational resource for use in the teaching of the new Aotearoa NZ Histories Curriculum.