James Taylor, Online Collections Information and Partnership Manager at Tāmaki Paenga Hira discusses the challenge of reaching the potential vast new online audience of over 250,000 students who will be learning about Aotearoa's past through the new compulsory history curriculum.

The museum aims to complement on-site education programs with online resources that cater to local histories where schools are and are also engaging for students. To achieve this, they have started leveraging Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular information websites, by enhancing local history topic pages with intellectual capital, collections, and staff expertise. Wikipedia can also be used as a platform to teach media literacy and critical thinking skills, which are crucially important in this era of misinformation.

Taylor talks about a project they are working on that explores the use of Wikipedia in secondary school classrooms in New Zealand, with the goal of growing a diverse and multicultural group of editors for the Wikimedia movement. The project is still ongoing, but has already revealed some initial findings from their literature review, including that students value the information they find on Wikipedia, and that it can enable critical thinking skills.

The team is about to start working directly with teachers to gather more information and insights, and they invite those interested to collaborate with them. The project has the support of the Wikimedia Foundation education team, and they hope to scale it across Auckland and the rest of the country.

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