The Khalili Foundation is working with UNESCO and Wikimedia UK on a project to raise awareness of the diversity of the world’s cultural heritage. This effort, fully funded by the Khalili Foundation, uses Wikipedia and related platforms to raise awareness of the UNESCO-hosted Memory of the World register. So far we have made hundreds of changes to Wikipedia, reached beyond English to other languages, and reached millions of image views.
The Memory of the World (MOW) International Register records nearly six hundred items of globally-important documentary heritage, from manuscripts, stone inscriptions, and films or audio archives, to entire libraries. Like the Khalili Collections, the register freely shares knowledge about the most celebrated and important cultural outputs from many different times and places.
Wikipedia’s volunteer community had already created many articles about the register, but errors had crept in, links were broken, and the 2023 additions to the register were missing. Many articles about MOW inscriptions did not mention that they were on the register. The situation is looking better now that we have overhauled and updated Wikipedia’s lists of MOW inscriptions and dozens of related articles.
The register includes some famous works such as the Magna Carta, the Diary of Anne Frank, or the Wizard of Oz. These topics only needed small factual corrections. Most of our time is spent on African, Caribbean, and South-American culture that is routinely under-represented online.
Hence one outcome is a new article on An African Song or Chant from Barbados, a precious written record of a song sung by West African enslaved workers. Despite being the subject of a festival and a documentary film, this song was not mentioned on English Wikipedia until we created an article. We put the song manuscript on the front page of Wikipedia where it was seen more than five million times. Another new article describes the Human Rights Archive of Chile: the documented record of abuses by the Pinochet Regime and an example of how cultural heritage is connected to struggles for justice and civil rights.
Wikimedia UK is working with volunteers to help translate articles, reaching new audiences. So for example, Spanish readers can now learn about Vietnamese woodblocks.
With the Khalili Foundation grant, UNESCO has employed a cultural consultant, Hannah Drummen. Together we are working on extracting useful information from the many MOW nomination forms and sharing it on the multilingual platform Wikidata. This will make things easier for the hundreds of Wikipedia language communities to maintain articles about the MOW international register that are complete and up to date.
With hundreds of inscriptions in the international register and hundreds of languages of Wikipedia, this is an enormously ambitious project but we are making changes that will magnify the reach and awareness of the Memory of the World programme.
Waqās Ahmed, Executive Director of the Khalili Foundation, announcing the highlights of the project at the AlUla Documentary Heritage conference at UNESCO in Paris in April.
