Education/News/January 2024/Summer students at Auckland Museum

Summer students at Auckland Museum

Summary: In 2023, a new history curriculum was established in schools across Aotearoa New Zealand. The curriculum focuses on local history, but currently, there are not many accessible history resources for teachers and students. Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira applied for a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation in order to improve local history pages, and as a part of this grant, the museum is hosting four university students over the summer of 2023/24, who are learning how to edit Wikipedia and developing pages on local history.

Earlier 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. 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. At the museum, we had 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! By the end of week two, the students had published seven articles.

Our programme has included talks and discussions with guest speakers. Some come from a local history background, such as history curriculum developer Mark Sheehan and historian Lucy Mackintosh, while others are Wikimedians, including Pasifika Arts Aotearoa editor Sophia Coghini and UK Wikimedian of the Year 2022 Lucy Moore.

Check out our weekly progress updates, and the project dashboard. Currently, the cohort have created or greatly improved 16 articles, not even halfway into the programme.

The second half of the programme will involve a student-led edit-a-thon currently planned to be held on 27 January 2024.