GLAM/Newsletter/January 2025/Contents/Memory of the World report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue I, January 2025

Memory of the World report

To the front page!

Advocacy

At a Wikimedia UK event at the University of Leeds, I presented about the Memory of the World project and led a discussion on ways forward for the work. This led to a follow-up online meeting with John Cummings (former Wikimedian In Residence at UNESCO, now working with UN organisations to share their content on Wikimedia) and an email exchange with Ewan McAndrew (WIR at University of Edinburgh).

A lot of suggestions for the project have come out of these discussions. We talked about international contacts the group could tell about the project, student projects at the University of Edinburgh that might create articles, OpenRefine software that could help with bulk-importing the data set, and Wikiprojects that I can use to engage volunteers. There was a comment that with a scope of 500 articles in 300 languages, this is potentially the biggest GLAM-Wiki project ever. What we can aim to do in the current time-limited project is to make it easier to monitor progress and set in motion activity that creates and improves articles over the next few years.

On English Wikipedia

An African Song or Chant from Barbados: this was put up for DYK review and quickly passed. It appeared on the front page of English Wikipedia on 3 February, getting 5.1 million image views.
New article: Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao
New article: Australian Memory of the World Register. A lot of inscriptions were incorrectly included in Wikipedia's articles about the international register when they are only in national registers, so I moved that content into these two dedicated articles.
Memory of the World Register – Latin America and the Caribbean updated content and replaced all the broken links
Memory of the World Register – Asia and the Pacific: updated content and fixed some broken links
Memory of the World Register – Arab States: added flag icons
Memory of the World Programme minor edits

On Commons

A systematic problem on Wikimedia Commons is that categories are applied too broadly. For example, all files relevant to the Rig Veda are included in the Memory of the World category, even though only certain Rig Veda manuscripts have MOW status. The same applies to the Gutenberg Bible. Thus, huge numbers of images that have nothing to do with MOW appear in the Commons category. I have done some edits to improve the situation, talked about this problem at the Leeds event, and will raise the issue with the community to try and get volunteer help. There might have to be a dedicated category for digital representations of MOW inscriptions, but that would be a lot of work so I hope instead we can fix the existing categories.

New articles in other languages

These have been created by volunteers, not always with links to the relevant entry in the UNESCO MOW online register. So there is scope for future work to add them.

Catalan: Hereford Mappa Mundi
Italian: The Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem of the Austrian National Library
Japanese: Malay Annals
Urdu: Benz Patent-Motorwagen
Hindi: Bayeux Tapestry
Aragonese: Benz Patent-Motorwagen

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). Following the "All languages" links and summing the numbers, we get 20,042 page views.

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