To celebrate living heritage and mark the twentieth anniversary of the Convention, the ‘Wiki Loves Living Heritage’ campaign was launched in the spring of 2023. The campaign has been successful in bringing together numerous actors from various fields together. The campaign has resulted in 5 500 living heritage elements described in Wikidata, representing over 24 000 existing and new Wikipedia articles written about them in 276 different languages as well as 3000 new photos in Wikimedia Commons.
To celebrate living heritage and mark the twentieth anniversary of the Convention, the ‘Wiki Loves Living Heritage’ campaign was launched by the European Network of Focal Points for the 2003 Convention (ENFP) in collaboration with Finnish NGO AvoinGLAM in the spring of 2023. The idea was to create a participatory, community-driven initiative calling on heritage practitioners, local Wikimedia volunteers as well as the ICH Focal Points, facilitators, accredited ICH NGOs and other stakeholders around the world to document and celebrate their living heritage.
The common aim has been to bring together actors to work on a common goal: bring more awareness and document ICH in a participatory manner – online and grassroots – to enhance the safeguarding of living heritage worldwide.
This year has been a door opener for many fruitful cooperations in the future. It has created learning and skill sharing opportunities for both the local heritage practitioners, the ICH Focal Points as well as Wikimedia communities, NGOs and other stakeholders. In doing so, it combines a strong commitment to ethical sharing while promoting open access to cultural heritage. The legacy of the campaign is to bring new kinds of communities and networks together to start the dialogue and to find new ways of working together. The common work will continue.
The campaign has spawned a range of initiatives across continents and over 30 countries – from Finland and Belgium via Singapore to Canada and Chile. More than one hundred inventories of ICH have been brought to wikidata to provide more accessibility to these inventories.
Events and photo contests have been organized in different parts of the world. The European photo contest related to the campaign resulted in 1 700 photos. In Singapore, the photo contest gathered more than 1 000 photos. All these photos are now openly available in Wikimedia Commons.
Events related to the Wiki-campaign have been held online and onsite in various countries. In Europe cooperation between focal points have been strengthened with the European Heritage Day coordinators. Wikimania, the main annual global event of the wikicommunity, was organized this year in Singapore with keynotes around ICH for more than 2 000 participants.
The campaign was supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, Council of Europe/ European Heritage Days, Quebec Council for Living Heritage, Dutch Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage, Federal Office of Culture of Switzerland, Workshop intangible heritage Flanders & Flemish Commission for UNESCO in Belgium and the Finnish Heritage Agency.
More info :
- blog post summarizing the campaign
- about the global Wiki Loves Living Heritage campaign
- about European network of focal points for the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ENFP)
- about the card deck for the Ethics of Open Sharing
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