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Memory of the World report

Baseline report

By MartinPoulter

Introducing the project

Page from Jikji, the first book to be printed with movable type.

In 2023 and 2024, the Khalili Foundation is supporting and fully funding a project to improve the visibility of UNESCO Memory of the World inscriptions on Wikimedia platforms. Sir David Khalili is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, and this project is one of many cultural diversity projects that his foundation supports. As Wikimedian In Residence at the Khalili Foundation, I will be co-ordinating with the team at UNESCO and updating Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and English Wikipedia.

See the announcement of this project on the Khalili Foundation web site.

The Memory of the World Register includes valuable documentary heritage from around the world, from many cultures and time periods. So making this diverse heritage accessible and shareable by everyone in the world this is a cultural diversity project central to the mission of the Wikimedia movement and the Creative Commons movement as well as the Khalili Foundation.

Sir David Khalili launched the project with a keynote speech at the recent Memory of the World conference at UNESCO in Paris, also attended by myself and by Waqas Ahmed, Executive Director of the Foundation. One theme that recurred at the conference was access to documentary heritage on digital platforms, and Wikipedia was the subject of approving comments by several speakers.

The present situation

Shrines containing Buddhist texts in the Ku Tho Daw pagoda. Mandalay, Myanmar

In the initial weeks of this project, I have been preparing a baseline report of the representation of the Memory of the World register on Wikimedia platforms. Here is a short summary of findings.

Firstly, it should be acknowledged that the current representation of the Memory of the World Register on Wikimedia is the result of a huge amount of work. Many thanks are due to the past Wikimedian In Residence at UNESCO (John Cummings), to Sandra Fauconnier (Wikipedian in Residence: Memory of the World Register, 2017, who uploaded files relating to MotW inscriptions in the Netherlands) and the wider volunteer communities.

Secondly, it emerges that there are huge gaps of information. There are currently 494 MotW inscriptions. Wikidata knows of 349 of them, although there are definitely some mis-tagged. So about a third of the inscriptions are unknown to the Wikimedia ecosystem. Of the 349 Wikidata items representing inscriptions, a great majority are missing basic information: which collection they are in, what language they are in, when they were created, and so on. Only 86 of them have images. Smaller Wikipedias could create Wikidata-driven list articles of MotW inscriptions if this were fixed.

There are a total of 1660 Wikipedia articles about individual inscriptions. These are spread across 164 languages, including 76 in English, 66 in German, and 60 in French. The non-European language with most articles is Indonesian, with 41. The inscriptions with the most Wikipedia articles are the Magna Carta with 95 and the Rig Veda with 94.

There are hundreds of links from Wikimedia platforms to the old UNESCO database: links which now give a 404 error.

Wikisource has 65 transcriptions of MotW inscriptions, in a total of 28 languages. It has 98 transcriptions of individual documents from inscribed collections or archives. For instance, the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty are inscribed in MotW and several individual documents from this collection are transcribed on Chinese Wikisource and Korean Wikisource.

Files on Wikimedia Commons are a mess. Categorisation is so sloppy that a search for images of MotW inscriptions returns all kinds of irrelevant content. We would very much like to know how many images related to MotW there are, how many are Featured Images or have other quality badges, how many inscriptions have dedicated image galleries, and how many views these images are getting. These questions can't be answered until a lot of categorisation work is done. It is striking how absent African, Caribbean, and Latin American culture is from this image collection.


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