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Memory of the World report

Ways forward

By MartinPoulter

This is the third 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.

Improvements on Wikipedia and Wikidata

An African Song or Chant from Barbados

Welcome to the world the latest English Wikipedia article about a Memory of the World inscription, An African Song or Chant from Barbados. This is partly based on an existing German-language article, but I have re-written to improve on the automated translation, and with additional scholarly sources.

On 13 December, I met online with three of the UNESCO Memory of the World team - Dian, Yahia and Hannah - to deliver a training session on adding information to Wikidata. There is a lot of useful information in the MOW nomination forms that does not exist in any structured form: inception (when a collection started to exist), collection size, and copyright status are examples. We discussed creating properly sourced Wikidata statements using the nomination forms, then harvesting that structured data back into the UNESCO site. This could also be done in the other direction, created structured data in the UNESCO database and importing it into Wikidata; this is up to the UNESCO team how they want to proceed. With a structured data set, we could ask for UNESCO inscriptions from a given continent that are in the public domain, or create a timeline of when the inscriptions were created, or find inscriptions that consist of more than a thousand objects.

The English Wikipedia articles about the Memory of the World register all had grammatically odd introductory text, so I have improved this. They also have outdated links, and these can not be fixed by importing from Wikidata. I have completely updated the list of African inscriptions, replacing all broken links and adding in flag images to make it more colourful.

I have created a project page about the Khalili Foundation/ UNESCO/ Wikimedia UK Memory of the World project on the Meta wiki, which hosts project pages for similar collaborations. This tells Wikimedia contributors what they can do to help.

Data quality issues

The Memory of the World programme includes the international register (cultural heritage of global importance) as well as dozens of national or regional registers. One issue I discovered is that Wikimedia contributors sometimes mix up these registers. I found 12 items in Wikidata with statements “heritage designation ⇒ Memory of the World” but they were inscriptions on the New Zealand national register, not the international register. I also found 133 entries in an English Wikipedia article about the international register that were actually from Brazil’s national MOW register.

The focus of the current project is the Wikimedia representation of the international register, but having an accurate representation of that register means removing inscriptions that have been added by mistake. The actions I took as a result were to:

There is probably a need for more drastic changes on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons to prevent confusion between the international register and other registers.

I have also been replacing some broken links on English, French, and German Wikipedia with links to the current online MOW catalogue.

New articles

The Malay Annals now have articles in fifteen languages, the latest being Serbo-Croatian

I have a way of querying Wikidata to identify new articles across all versions of Wikipedia; this is an important part of the Khalili Collections work. When I tried to apply this to the Memory of the World, the reporting system broke, overwhelmed by the combination of nearly 500 topics and 300 languages. So I experimented with different ways to create a report, and settled on seven queries targeting different language groups, plus a separate query for Wikisource transcriptions, plus a separate query for new articles about the Memory of the World register (rather than the individual inscriptions). Below is a report about new articles about MOW inscriptions created in November and December 2024:

This report is probably incomplete because about a third of MOW inscriptions are presently unknown to Wikidata.

Page views on Wikipedia

This link shows the popularity (views by humans) of English Wikipedia articles about the Memory of the World programme and International Register (not articles about the individual inscriptions). By following the "All languages" links and summing the numbers, we get a total figure for views of the articles across all language versions of Wikipedia:

  • November 2024: 21,641 views
  • December 2024: 20,906 views


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