Preserving the Memory of the World: an opportunity for Wikipedia

The Wikipedia communities have a new opportunity to more completely represent the world’s most important documentary heritage. By freely sharing UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register, we can highlight under-represented cultures, commemorate great intellectuals, and preserve vital historical records. This is what we have been working towards over the past several months. This activity is supported and funded by the Khalili Foundation — a UK-based charity pioneering intercultural dialogue for over three decades — as part of its work promoting cultural diversity. The work is led by the foundation’s Wikimedian In Residence, Dr Martin Poulter, with the involvement of the Memory of the World team at UNESCO and of Wikimedia UK.

The Khalili Foundation’s Wikimedia partnership, running since 2020, has already diversified Wikipedia’s representation of visual art, drawing on the eight Khalili Collections, all of which contain art outside of the Western mainstream. The foundation is also, through its Wikimedian In Residence, raising the awareness of other cultural collections as part of its mission.

The International Register

UNESCO launched the Memory of the World (MoW) Programme in 1992 “to guard against collective amnesia, calling for preservation of valuable archive holdings and library collections all over the world and ensuring their wide dissemination”. The MoW International Register recognises documentary heritage of global significance: textual and audiovisual materials whose loss would be tragic for humanity as a whole. There are also regional and national MoW registers; our focus is the international register.

As of April 2025, 570 pieces of heritage from all over the world are inscribed on the register. These can be books, letters, stone inscriptions, manuscripts, films, photographs, or audio recordings. Among them are some very famous documents — Anne Frank’s diary, Magna Carta, the Rigveda — and also many less-well-known archives that are crucial in documenting the impact of colonialism, authoritarianism, and struggles for civil rights. The official online version of the register includes entries for all inscriptions in both English and French and can be searched or browsed by country, region, or date.

The register on Wikimedia

Wikimedia platforms serve as more than just data repositories; they are powerful tools for intercultural exchange and understanding. They empower communities to tell their own stories – in their own voices and on their own terms, while also engaging with and learning from the narratives of others. This common goal of intercultural understanding makes Wikimedia and MoW ideal for each other, and make it imperative that the register is represented fully and accurately.

There has been admirable work done over the years to represent the MoW international register on Wikimedia. Still, we found large gaps and inconsistencies. A query of Wikidata for MoW inscriptions gave 349 results when the true number was 496. Wikipedia articles about some of the most famous inscriptions did not mention their Memory of the World recognition. Across multiple projects, there was confusion between the international, regional, and national registers. The most extensively-described inscriptions, in Wikipedia as well as in scholarly sources, tend to come from European and North American culture; Africa and Latin America are least well-represented.

We have been working across English Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons to improve coverage of the international register and of the individual inscriptions. We recently achieved a milestone by creating a Wikidata data set that is complete up to 2023, and includes details like copyright status or size of collection. This allows many language versions of Wikipedia to quickly generate list articles. It also helps us identify new articles about inscriptions, and find opportunities for translation.

How you can help

There are many ways you can help to improve the representation of the international register, in whatever language versions of Wikipedia you contribute to:

• fixing an outdated external link
• adding a mention of the International Register to a relevant Wikipedia article
• translating an article
• writing a new article about an inscription
• updating a list article

We have prepared a guide that goes into more detail, and helps you to navigate the online register. We will link it in a comment on this article. With hundreds of MoW inscriptions and hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia, there is a huge number of additions that could be done. Some of these will be new articles; many will involve just a new fact and citation in existing articles.

During August we will run a Memory of the World challenge in which Wikimedia volunteers can score points by doing some of these tasks. UNESCO is providing books and stickers as rewards. This challenge will be announced on the project page on Meta.

Through your contributions, you are supporting UNESCO and the Khalili Foundation’s mission to preserve humanity’s shared memory, foster intercultural dialogue, and make knowledge truly universal.

Acknowledgements: We thank Richard Nevell and Belvin Tawuya of Wikimedia UK and Waqas Ahmed of the Khalili Foundation for early feedback on this article.