In 2023, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira successfully applied for a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to improve articles on local suburbs and local history. The New Zealand Government instigated a new history curriculum at the beginning of the year, focusing on local history and local stories. This grant focused on developing Wikipedia pages on suburbs of the Auckland Region, as a way to provide broad oversights of locations, and point students and teachers to good resources available on local stories.
As of December 2023, 73 suburb pages have been improved, focusing on suburbs with the highest numbers of school students. In addition, articles on the five main metropolitan subregions of Auckland have been vastly improved (the Auckland isthmus, East Auckland, North Shore, New Zealand, South Auckland, and West Auckland). As of the end of 2023, the most successful of the improved articles is Papatoetoe, which received approximately 17,000 views since being worked on, and West Auckland, which received 12,000 views and has reached Good Article status.
In early 2024 the project will continue, looking to develop pages on two subregions north of Auckland (Hibiscus Coast and Matakana Coast), five towns in the Auckland Region (Warkworth, Wellsford, Pukekohe, Waiuku and Helensville), and the remaining suburbs with the largest student populations.
Summer students at Auckland Museum edit
As a part of this project, the Wikimedia Foundation and the museum co-funded four Wikipedia interns to join our summer student cohort, learning how to edit Wikipedia over the 2023/24 summer period. The brief for our students is simple: create or improve articles related to the Auckland Region/Tāmaki Makaurau, based on what you feel passionate about, and what you feel will be beneficial for students learning about history. Currently, the students have discussed focusing on a few different aspects, including:
- More content on Te Ao Māori and Māori history
- Queer history
- Elevating Pasifika voices, and showcasing South Auckland culture
- Natural history
- Wikipedia pages on immigrant communities, including South Asian communities
Students spent the first two weeks learning about Wikimedia, including the limitations and benefits of the platform, issues such as conflicts of interest, and learnt how to edit. We'd planned for students to start posting articles by week three, but one student wrote and published her first article only four days into the programme!
So far, the programme has featured chats with guest speakers, including history education specialist Mark Sheehan, Pasifika Arts Aotearoa 2022 Wikipedian Sophia Coghini, historian Lucy Mackintosh, and Lucy Moore, UK Wikimedian of the Year 2022.
At the half way mark through the programme, students had written 18 pages, including natural history pages (Takapuna Fossil Forest), queer history (Ca d'Oro Coffee Lounge), Māori history of Tāmaki Makaurau (Tara Te Irirangi), and pages that focused on Pasifika and South Asian migrants to Aotearoa (Uluomato'otua Aiono, Phomen Singh).
Check out our weekly progress updates and the project dashboard, and read some extracts from their articles below.