GLAM/Newsletter/December 2025/Contents/Memory of the World report
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2025 in review
This is the fifteenth 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.
Video from GLAM-Wiki conference
Martin's talk at the Lisbon conference is online here (from 28:20 to 38:44).
Representing the register
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This month the English Wikipedia and Wikidata representations of the MoW International Register were updated with the 74 additions from 2025. The lists and numbers are now up-to-date.
In the course of updating these lists, Martin:
- improved information about the institutions where inscriptions are located;
- connected the new data to existing representations of the inscriptions;
- replaced outdated links to the register on English Wikipedia.
There are still some institutions mentioned in the UNESCO data set that do not have a representation on any of the wiki platforms: some of these will be left as tasks for the wiki volunteer communities.
New Wikipedia articles
- Thai: The Golden Letter of the Burmese King Alaungphaya to King George II of Great Britain
- Korean: Terengganu Inscription Stone
Thanks to the updated data set, we can now find Wikipedia articles that were created earlier in the year but which we did not detect at the time:
- Swedish: Karl Tirén's collection of sami yoik
- Swedish: Ravensbrück archive in Lund
- Persian: The Archives of the Planet
- Japanese: Karatepe Bilingual
- Chinese: Ravensbrück archive in Lund
- Thai: Galle Trilingual Stele
- English: Treaty of Fribourg (1516)
Page and Image views
The Massviews tool reports 4,033,074 views in December on English Wikipedia articles that link to the MoW International Register.
The GLAMorgan tool reports 127 million image views in December for images related to the MoW International Register. This is likely an overestimate.
Summary of the year
The Wikipedia and Wikidata representation of the register has been totally transformed this year. Several hundred outdated web links have been removed and hundreds of correct links added across all wiki platforms. All 570 inscriptions have entries in Wikidata with their years of inscription; nominating countries or organisations; names and links in English and French; and other relevant properties. These data are already being used to generate list articles in multiple language versions of Wikipedia.
Through the year, we have found Wikipedia articles that are relevant to the International Register but had no mention of it: we have added links to the Wikipedia articles about UNESCO and the Memory of the World, as well as external links to the register itself. This has cumulatively led to the four million per month figure above and to the Memory of World International Register being one of the most popular parts of the UNESCO web site.
At the start of the year, the wiki platforms still confused the international, regional, and national registers. As well as making this distinction in Wikimedia Commons categories and Wikidata statements, I created the English Wikipedia articles Australian Memory of the World Register and Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao to keep these national lists separate from the international register.
This year included the MoW Wiki Challenge in which volunteers created new Wikipedia articles, updated web links, and translated labels on Wikidata. Information was added in a total of 43 languages.
The huge numbers of image views and page views establish Wikipedia as the main way in which the public find out about the Memory of the World International Register and its individual inscriptions and a main conduit of traffic to the online International Register.
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