GLAM/Newsletter/April 2025/Contents/Memory of the World report
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Surging forward in Spanish and Arabic
This is the seventh monthly report of the ongoing work to improve the representation of the UNESCO Memory of the World international register on Wikimedia projects. This is supported and fully funded by the Khalili Foundation, with the involvement of UNESCO and Wikimedia UK.
Hannah Drummen has been employed by UNESCO as a cultural consultant to work on this project. Martin and Hannah are working together to prepare a data set for import into Wikidata (see below) and fixing minor errors both in Wikipedia and in the MoW online register.
- While 496 MoW inscriptions have pages in English in the current online register, not all of them have counterparts in French. Hannah is creating French pages for 14 inscriptions that lack them. Both the English and French links will be added to Wikidata so that Wikipedia communities can choose the link they prefer.
- Another task Hannah will be doing is contacting host institutions to get images for the inscriptions that lack them.
In the last month, 74 new inscriptions have been added to the Memory of the World International Register, raising the total to 570. (So just as we got the lists on Wikipedia up-to-date, they became out of date.) It will take time for the 74 new entries to appear in the MoW online register, so for now we are concentrating on getting Wikipedia lists up-to-date for the 496 inscriptions as of 2023.
Data import
Martin has captured some basic data from the online MoW register into a Google Sheet. Hannah and Martin are filling this out with facts extracted from the nomination forms and gradually converting it for use on Wikidata. The aim is to get a basic data upload done in May, publicise this to engage Wikimedia volunteers in creating articles or task-lists, then do a more detailed data upload in a few months, including the 74 new additions, and with more detail.
New Wikipedia articles
Wikimedia UK has been working with a volunteer translator to create three new articles in Spanish Wikipedia. I have been finishing up these articles and a new English article, fixing broken links and citation errors.
- English: Westerbork film
- Spanish: The Cabinet of Folksongs
- Spanish: Icelandic census of 1703
- Spanish: Woodblocks of the Nguyễn Dynasty
- Papiamento: Memory of the World
- Arabic: Terengganu Inscription Stone
- Arabic: Baysonghor Shahnameh
- Arabic: Chronicle of the Descendants of Timur
- Swedish: Ravensbrück archive in Lund
- Turkish: Hereford Mappa Mundi
- Basque: Mappa mundi d'Albi
Wikipedia improvements
Martin has been through 59 English articles about MoW inscriptions, adding up-to-date descriptions and links about the Memory of the World recognition. For a few articles in Turkish, Spanish, Dutch, and German, this work involved replacing broken links. Martin also improved the list articles Memory of the World Register – Asia and the Pacific, Memory of the World Register – Latin America and the Caribbean, and Memory of the World Register – Europe and North America to fix errors, add more location information and enable more consistency. The result is dozens more incoming links to the articles about the register, and more links from Wikipedia to the UNESCO site.
Page views on Wikipedia
There has been a surge of interest in list articles about the MoW International Register: 27,155 views this month (across all languages) compared to 16,940 views last month.
Publicity
The UNESCO site now has a set of pages about the Khalili Foundation collaboration which will be continually updated as the project progresses.
The Khalili Foundation published a blog post summarising the project so far.
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