Wikicite/grant/Research Records of Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum./Report

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

The overarching goal of this project was to help unlock the knowledge held within Auckland Museum's academic outputs and research publications. To achieve this we said we'd focus on uploading 450+ articles of the Records of Auckland Museum into Wikidata, as well as other publications the museum holds copyright for. We also wanted to strengthen our relationship with both the local Auckland and national New Zealand Wikimedia communities by hosting meetups and training events.

Overall we met these goals and are pleased with the way the project went. We set up a project dashboard which shows the work that User:Prosperosity undertook from January to May this year at a high level: 49 articles were created, 273 articles were edited, 882 referenced were added and 12 items were uploaded to Commons. A case study of the work that was undertaken has been appended to this report.

Uploading articles from the Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum into Wikidata

Every article of the Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum and Records of the Auckland Museum has a Wikidata entry.

Because of time constraints we didn't get on to uploading data around other Museum publications.

Uploading content to Wikipedia

Between January and May 2021, the Wikimedian in Residence added 882 references to the English language Wikipedia, primarily using the Records of the Auckland Museum as a source. All articles between volume 16 and volume 55 (1979-2020) were assessed for how likely useful citations would be found in the works.

Some popular articles which have benefited the most from the project include: Kapiti Island, Manawatāwhi / Three Kings Islands, Māori traditional textiles, Waitākere Ranges, Helensville, First Taranaki War, adze, paper mulberry, Phormium tenax, Paeroa, Drepanacra binocula, Acanthopagrus australis and Ōtāhuhu.

Uploading the Records of the Auckland Institute and Museum to Commons

As of May 2021 only two issues of the Records have been uploaded to Commons. Progress was stalled on this as staff recognised there were a number of copyright and cultural permission issues around the bulk upload of this content to Commons. In short, any taonga included in the pages (e.g. a depiction of an ancestor or important cultural work) can by the nature of the CC-By licence be used for commercial purposes that the people associated with the subject have no control over. Because of this, the version of the Records uploaded to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (which are pulled through to Commons) need to be individually checked. This process is on-going and instructions on how to upload cleared content has been written up for Museum staff.

Community Events & Engagement

Two community events were held, which were pushed back to May because of New Zealand's COVID lockdowns earlier this year.

The first event on 1 May focused on the Women in Red project, where editors could make or improve articles on New Zealand women.

• 9 participants – a mix of museum staff and people from the community.
• Created four articles in-person at the event and improved one article from stub class to start class. Online participants created six articles. There is a dashboard for this event.

The second event on 21 May was a workshop for the local Auckland GLAM sector covering how GLAMs can work with Wikipedia for the mutual benefit of both.

• 22 participants - again a mix of museum staff and local GLAM staff
• Workshop covered Auckland Museum's work with Wikipedia, an overview of Wikipedia basics and editing, and some editing exercises.

User:Prosperosity has also been regularly attending national online meetups.

We also held a couple of Wikipedia training sessions for Museum staff and recruited one Museum volunteer to work adding references to Wikipedia.

The Wikimedian in Residence's work was featured in this blog post on the Auckland Museum website, and publicised on Facebook and Instagram.

Blogpost on the Wikimedia "diff" blog at: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/unlocking-auckland-museums-research-with-wikicite/

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Increase in the number of articles using Auckland Museum research.	Yes	882 references primarily from AM research have been added to Wikipedia articles, as per the project dashboard
Hosting two meetup during the 5 months, inviting local editors into the museum.	Yes	Two meetups were held, on 1 & 21 May.
Publishing a blog providing an overview of the new content.	Yes	A blog was published on the Museum's website around the Wikimedian in Residence's work. The case study is linked from this report, and we will post the case study on AM Labs.
Auckland Museum social media promotion of the new resources.	To do	We will begin a social media promotion campaign of the new GLAM resources in the coming weeks.
Wikiproject page updated with guide to new resources.	To do	The GLAM How To guides will be uploaded to Wikimedia and linked to from the AM Wiki GLAM Project page by the end of this week (4 June 21).
Targeted associated media is incorporated into WikiCommons	In progress	Five issues of the Records have been uploaded to Wikimedia. However due to the need for thorough checking of cultural permissions this will be an on-going process as part of our workflow uploading the records to the BHL.
Case Study published on the process of metadata round-tripping using The Records of Auckland Museum.	Partial	We think that providing a case study of data-round tripping was overly ambitious, and doesn't necessarily work with the content associated with this project, (it may be better suited for a Wikidata/Commons project pulling crowd sourced image "depicts" information back in to our source systems, or information from biographical articles). However we have published a case study of how GLAMs can create new Wikipedia articles using resources in their collections, which is appended to this report.

Lessons learned

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well?

We feel that most aspects of the project went well. Adding the articles to Wikidata was relatively straightforward, and we believe that we have created resources which show how GLAMs can make their research and collections more widely accessible in a fairly straightforward manner as well as adding to the quality of information on Wikipedia. The events were also successful, even if we only had smallish turnouts for them, with a handful of new editors joining us for both.

• What did not work so well?

As mentioned above, we ran into issues around copyright/cultural permissions when it came to uploading copies of the Records to Wikimedia. However, we will continue this as part of our longer term work uploading this content to the Biodiversity Heritage Library.In terms of the content of the records, we found that there was less useful information contained in articles written before 1979. Information in these articles tend to be out of date or superseded by later research.

Our in-person events were affected by the COVID lockdown we had in Auckland in February, however we rescheduled these for May.

The one area that we struggled with was around data round-tripping. A problem with a project of this nature is that there isn't a lot of data to bring back from Wikimedia/Wikipedia at this stage. Round tripping would potentially be more useful with collection images (ie getting Wikidata depicts) information, or pulling through biographical information from Wikipedia, which some GLAMs have started doing. In lieu of this we have prepared a case study on the process of creating Wikipedia articles with information from the Records, and have also put together some how-tos/instructions which will be uploaded to Wikimedia.

• What would you do differently next time?

We are generally happy with how the project progressed, as we achieved most of our goals. One area to do differently would have given more time to thinking about what data-tripping would look like in this sort of project.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

$10,924 - WiR salary
$181 - Morning tea/lunch - Meetup 1 May
$482 - Catering - Workshop 21 May
$11,587 - total funds spent

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

$1413 remaining

After discussion with WMF administrators we have agreed to spend part of the remaining money on translation of a blog post about the project into te reo Māori on Diff, the Wikimedia Blog ($413), and transfer the remaining funds ($1000) to the organisers of the 2021 Auckland Wikicon.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Thanks to Wikicite and the WIkimedia Foundation for providing this funding. We have appreciated the opportunity to make the Museum's research more accessible, as well as growing our engagement with the local Wikimedia community. We're hoping to build on the momentum and goodwill that this project has enabled, both within the Museum, the local GLAM sector and Wikipedia editing community, by continuing to host regular meetups in the Museum library, as well as sharing our work at the upcoming Wikicon and other relevant events.