GLAM/Newsletter/March 2025/Contents/Memory of the World report
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Manuscripts of Mali
This is the sixth 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.
The Register on English Wikipedia
I have improved Memory of the World Register – Asia and the Pacific, Memory of the World Register – Africa, Memory of the World Register – International Organizations, Memory of the World Programme, and Memory of the World Register – Europe and North America. This has involved replacing many broken links and adding missing inscriptions (usually those that were accepted in 2023). The Europe and North America list is now updated, but there are still some locations to add and the numbers in the early part of the article need updating. Before this project, there were 565 links from English Wikipedia to the old site https://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-world/ (links that are now broken). This has been reduced to 124.
Image uploads
It has been difficult to find images to illustrate the African inscriptions, but this month I made some progress. Three Arabic manuscripts from Mali were inscribed on the international register in 2023. I created Wikidata items for each to represent the author, literary work, and manuscript. The UNESCO International Centre for Documentary Heritage had a public domain image for A reminder to those who do not pay attention to the harms caused by the divergence between believers so I uploaded that. The World Digital Library (hosted by Library of Congress) had a complete digitisation of Book of Healing from internal and external diseases affecting the body. Rather than upload all 506 images to Commons, I chose the ten most visually interesting and added them to a new Commons category with its own infobox. One image from this manuscript had already been uploaded by another user.
New articles by volunteers
Richard Nevell at Wikimedia UK has been in touch with a volunteer who is translating Wikipedia articles. Richard and I created a list of suggestions of articles relating to Memory of the World. This has resulted in a Spanish article on Dīwān ul-Lughat al-Turk, translated from the English. Thanks to user VeritatisAmans!
The Spanish article is one of nine new articles created by volunteers:
- English: Lorsch Pharmacopoeia
- German: Laurentian Codex
- Italian: Neighbours
- Ukrainian: Act of Union of Lublin
- Chinese: Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann
- Thai: Nebra sky disk
- Czech: Vienna Dioscurides
- Igbo: The Cabinet of Folksongs
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 19,487 page views.
- Albania report
- Argentina report
- Belgium report
- Brazil report
- Czech Republic report
- France report
- Italy report
- Netherlands report
- New Zealand report
- Nigeria report
- Poland report
- Switzerland report
- UK report
- USA report
- Biodiversity Heritage Library report
- Memory of the World report
- Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report
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