Invitation to participate in the Wiki Loves Living Heritage campaign

A Global Wikimedia campaign, “Wiki Loves Living Heritage”, invites heritage practitioners and communities, Wikimedia volunteers, NGOs and other organisations to document and share living heritage worldwide in images and video.

The activities will celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and relate to the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages. In Europe, it will also be related to the European Heritage Days (EHD) theme year, “Living Heritage”, under the Council of Europe and the European Commission. Furthermore, in 2023, it is the EU Year of Skills.

Global collaboration 

A range of partners in the global Living Heritage field join and collaborate to make Wiki Loves Living Heritage into an international success story in raising awareness and visibility of intangible heritage. Wiki Loves Living Heritage unites local Wikimedia communities and UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Focal Points (ENFP) to document and share living heritage on Wikimedia projects, earning global recognition for their collaborative efforts. It teams up with existing photography contests in the Wikimedia movement, such as Wiki Loves Folklore and Wiki Loves Africa.

Making Living Heritage visible

Wiki Loves Living Heritage results in a rich, evolving archive of openly available photographs and videos on Wikimedia Commons. The campaign will bring more visibility to UNESCO intangible cultural heritage lists and registers, national inventories, and other living heritage. The data and the coordinated participatory activities may result in writing articles for Wikipedia and illustrating them with the newly available images.

Preserving and enriching knowledge

Data about the heritage elements are invited to be added to Wikidata from the national inventories as linked data, which connects the media contributions to the data elements. Volunteers and stakeholders can add more knowledge and translations in hundreds of languages in Wikidata.

Responsible and open

The project makes a solid commitment to ethical sharing while it promotes open access to cultural heritage. The materials are produced in collaboration with the heritage communities or by themselves. A webinar before the contest starts will outline the project’s ethical guidelines. The data is made available as public domain data (CC0), and the participants agree to make their contributions available with a Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Learn more about the campaign at the website Wiki Loves Living Heritage
• Participate in the launch event on 17th March 1.00 - 2.30 pm UTC 
• Get in touch with your national Wikimedia affiliates and groups to see what activities you could do together during the year.
• Subscribe to the Wiki Loves Living Heritage newsletter to stay updated about all activities.

Partnership

The project is initiated jointly between the European network of focal points for the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ENFP) and AvoinGLAM. It is supported so far by European Heritage Days Network, Workshop intangible heritage Flanders & Flemish Commission for UNESCO in Belgium, Quebec Council for Living Heritage, Finnish Heritage Agency, Culture Ireland and Dutch Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Contact the coordinator of the initiative

• wikiloveslivingheritage@gmail.com • Susanna Ånäs / Avoin GLAM 

Or ask more from

• leena.marsio@museovirasto.fi • Finnish Heritage Agency / ENFP
• jorijn.neyrinck@gmail.com • Workshop Intangible Heritage / ENFP