GLAM/Newsletter/December 2024/Contents/Memory of the World report
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Ways forward
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
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 They also have outdated links, and these can not be fixed by importing from Wikidata.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:
- Create a Wikidata representation of the New Zealand national register
- Create a category for national registers
- Move the Brazilian national register to a new, dedicated article
- Add a new section to the Memory of the World Programme article
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.
- From the team
- Africa report
- AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report
- Albania report
- Argentina report
- Armenia report
- Aruba report
- Asia report
- Australia report
- Austria report
- Basque Country report
- Belgium report
- Bhutan report
- Brazil report
- Bulgaria report
- Canada report
- Catalan areas report
- Colombia report
- Côte d'Ivoire report
- Croatia report
- Czech Republic report
- Denmark report
- Estonia report
- Finland report
- France report
- Germany report
- Ghana report
- Greece report
- Hungary report
- India report
- Indonesia report
- Ireland report
- Israel report
- Italy report
- Kosovo report
- Latvia report
- Malaysia report
- Mexico report
- Netherlands report
- New Zealand report
- Nigeria report
- North Macedonia report
- Norway report
- Philippines report
- Poland report
- Portugal report
- Republic of Srpska report
- Republic of Korea report
- Romania report
- Russia report
- Serbia report
- South Africa report
- Spain report
- Sweden report
- Switzerland report
- Taiwan report
- Tunisia report
- UAE report
- Uganda report
- UK report
- Ukraine report
- Uruguay report
- USA report
- Biodiversity Heritage Library report
- Special story
- Open Access report
- AvoinGLAM report
- Content Partnerships Hub report
- Memory of the World report
- Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report
- Wikipedia Library report
- Wikidata report
- Wikisource report
- Wiki Loves Living Heritage report
- Wikimedia and Libraries User Group report
- WMF GLAM report
- GLAM Wiki conference report
- Calendar