Wikipedia’s editing community and organisations like Te Papa have been talking for decades about how much we can do for each other. But with only so many hours in the day, adding a global encyclopaedia to our workload is a hard sell. Digital Channels Outreach Manager Lucy Schrader fills you in on how we’re growing our own Wiki community, making this partnership much less intimidating.
In the world of GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), we’ve known for a long time that Wikipedia’s a great match for us. It introduces people to the topics and stories we care about, and helps them learn more after a visit. Our collections and research make articles more interesting, detailed, and reliable. Small and large audiences benefit from what we share, including those in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.
But knowing isn’t doing, because it turns out the work of contributing to Wikipedia is still work. And the people in GLAM institutions already have plenty of that. Working out what to do is hard. Getting the resourcing to do it is hard. Deciding to prioritise it over the millions of other things we need to do is really hard.
So at Te Papa, we’ve been figuring out how to make it easier. Instead of planning Huge Important Wikipedia Projects that take up tons of time and energy, and end with everyone zooming back to the rest of their work, never to touch Wikipedia again, we’ve flipped it over and asked how Wikipedia can help us do our jobs.
The GLAM + Wiki sandwich
The top piece of bread is the institutional or organisation level, and about what our strategy says, what Te Papa is for – to get people in touch with their heritage, with knowledge that connects to their lives now. We do that through exhibitions, public programmes, and our websites, and we can do that through Wikipedia too.
The bottom piece of bread is about the goals our staff have, and the tasks they’re completing to reach those goals. Some want to tell people about their amazing research on deep-sea fish, while others are all about making sure women photographers get the profile they deserve. Knowing how to make small but effective edits to Wikipedia can be one of the tools they can use to do that.
Our sandwich filling is the tasty part where those levels meet. (Yes, I know squishing two pieces of bread together doesn’t automatically generate an entire sandwich. Yes, I’ve tried.)
Because we’ve made it clear to leadership that this work is strategically sound, and because we can show staff that these skills are both achievable and useful in a way they care about, we get the magic of professional development.
With managers backing it, we’re able to run Wiki skill-learning sessions during work time. Staff are able to link what they learn directly to their existing work, and have it recognised as valuable, which is essential when reporting.
This has given us a growing community of editors right inside the museum, making sometimes small but useful contributions whenever the opportunity arises. Some are regularly creating whole new articles in their areas of expertise, and others are coming up with cool micro-projects (like improving representation of Aotearoa Asian artists, or reusing info from Wikidata on Collections Online) that wouldn’t have happened under a top-down approach.
The anatomy of a learning session
Te Papa’s learning sessions are very action-oriented. We want participants to be able to leave knowing how to do something new – ideally, having had the chance to try it out for themselves. We keep the talky presentation part minimal so there’s time to demonstrate the skill, let everyone practice it, and have the chance to discuss their ideas for using it in their job.
For example, here’s how we cover adding citations to articles.
Presentation
- Why good referencing is so important
- What to think about when finding sources
- How to use the Web Archive to get links that won’t break.
Demo
- Show how to add a real citation to a real article.
Practice
- Give the group a spreadsheet with references and articles ready to go
- Get them to practice, and lend them a hand as needed
- Get them to help each other out as they gain confidence.
Wrap up
- Discuss what everyone did and what they’d like to do next
- Send them off with an email full of useful links.
Sessions that are more of an introduction to a big topic, like fixing bias across Wikipedia, are more conversation than lecture. We make sure there are some concrete things for them to do during or after the session, like joining the Women in Red project, or drafting a stub article about an overlooked trans artist.
Making the case
Of course, to get to that point, you’ve got to get leadership on side – for us, it’s been a steady stream of evidence-backed communication reinforcing the idea that Wiki work is museum work.
That evidence can be found thanks to tools like GLAMorous and the Wikimedia Analytics API, which show how much a category of uploaded images or a set of edited articles is being used.
Those numbers don’t mean a lot by themselves, so we compare them with our own website’s traffic, which then shows a new, larger audience who can enjoy, learn from, and use what we share. This connection, evidence of the museum’s goals in action, is the compelling story that gets support – and we tell it here, on our intranet, in meetings and presentations, and in the hallway.
As we learn more about interpreting the evidence, we’re able to draw more qualitative comparisons with the audience’s experiences too. A view of a collection image on an article is like someone browsing part of a gallery, taking a look at an interpretation label. Someone adding one of our images to another article is like including it in their conference presentation.
We don’t promise to drive traffic to our websites or visits to the building. Instead, contributing to Wiki results in giving more people access to our unique collections and stories – just like we already do every day.
Creating learning sessions
So far, Te Papa has delivered sessions about adding references, loading up collection images, simple improvements like infoboxes and formatting, and fixing bias.
Creating a new learning session means figuring out what’s going to be genuinely useful, what the participants need to know, and how to fit it into an hour or so.
We’ve created a template to work through the process with prompts and examples – it helps drill down to what’s important and keeps the lesson on track. It covers:
- What the lesson is going to be about
- Why it’s useful at the strategic and ground levels
- What the participants need to be told and shown, and what they need to try
- How to break a task down into steps
- How to make it a smooth experience for everyone.
You might find it helpful too: Guide to creating Wiki lessons for staff (DOCX, 50KB)
We’d love to know if you give this a shot – email digitaloutreach@tepapa.govt.nz with your results!
