Wiki Loves Living Heritage/About
Celebrating living heritage around the world!
Wiki Loves Living Heritage is a wiki initiative that was created to pay tribute to living heritage on the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The project stays live and continues to grow, and can be activated for celebrations any time.
Living Heritage embraces practices, knowledge and skills that have been passed on through generations and are still valuable and in use today. It includes for example oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills related to crafts. Living heritage is not only diverse and colourful, but also an invaluable source of time-tested knowledge about how to live on our planet sustainably and peacefully.
Join documenting and sharing what living heritage matters for you today and your community: what you practice, cherish and safeguard!
Ways of working
Documenting Living Heritage
Wiki Loves Living Heritage invites heritage communities, Wikimedia volunteers, and safeguarding organizations and authorities around the world to document and share Living Heritage together.
The project aims to ensure that the documentation produced in this context is produced with the free, prior and informed consent of the heritage communities. In this way, we are creating a collection of works for which the consent is agreed and documented with the heritage communities.
Local activities
The different local communities are invited to continue working together on the local level.
The activities can be created together around already existing celebrations, events or projects that any of the communities and organizations are arranging. It is also possible to work with a thematic focus rather than a regional one. Get together with your local partners and invite others to join! You can share your ideas in the Ideas for activities page or at the regular meetings.
Reaching a global audience
Wiki Loves Living Heritage continues to surface local and thematic activities globally. Imported inventories are displayed in all languages of Wikimedia projects. Local campaigns can be created using the existing structures. Existing images and videos are highlighted and new ones are invited. The openly licensed texts are published on these web pages, and can be translated to any language. All contributions to this project are available for anyone through the Wikimedia projects.
Exchange your skills
The Get inspired section of these pages is dedicated to sharing skills. It’s possible to showcase traditional crafts and skills, or learn how to share materials on Wikimedia projects. The best practices for ethical documentation and sharing of living heritage are made available in many languages.
Data about the heritage elements
Basic information about the heritage elements in lists, registers and inventories around the world is added to Wikidata in collaboration with the participating communities and Wikimedians.
The data on Wikidata can be displayed as lists on wikis or as visualizations on any website. That makes it easy to upload photographs and videos in the right context with the right metadata. The data is available in hundreds of languages. Volunteers around the world will help by adding more details and translating multilingual parts. The enriched data is available for anyone for any purpose and it will become visible in web searches.
Data collecting will proceed at the pace and scope of the will of the heritage communities themselves, respecting the data sovereignty described in CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).
Get to know Wiki Loves Living Heritage
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The organizers
editThe team
- Susanna Ånäs, Partner liaison
- Leena Marsio and Jorijn Neyrinck, ENFP
- Sadik Shahadu, Communications manager
- Giovanna Fontenelle (Wikimedia Foundation), Coordinator for ethical sharing in collaboration with Bart Magnus (Creative Commons working group The Ethics of Open Sharing) and Jorijn Neyrinck (Workshop intangible heritage Flanders)
- Ethical sharing team, Editorial support team and Wikimedia contributions support team
In collaboration with
- Wiki Loves Folklore
- The working group on The Ethics of Open Sharing at Creative Commons
Advisory team
Representatives of
- Wikimedia contests.
- Representatives of the support teams
- Safeguarding organizations and authorities
- Wikimedia Foundation Culture & Heritage
- Funders and partners
- The working group on Ethical Sharing at Creative Commons
Names of the representatives will be added when they are confirmed.
In relation with
Wiki Loves Living Heritage will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the European Heritage Days theme year Living Heritage and can connect with the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. Furthermore, the European Commission has dedicated 2023 as the Year of Skills.
Wikimedia Foundation, European Heritage Days, Workshop intangible heritage Flanders & Flemish Commission for UNESCO in Belgium, Quebec Council for Living Heritage, Finnish Heritage Agency, Dutch Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Federal Office of Culture
Project initiated by the European network of focal points for the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ENFP) and AvoinGLAM and created by organizers around the world.