About folkroom
A free public archive of the world’s living traditions — the dances, songs, weaves, crafts, paintings, dishes and stories that people still make, and the sources that say so.
Two rooms, one wall
The mark is two rings whose strokes merge into a single shared wall. It is the product’s architecture as much as its logo. Two rooms: a tradition and its neighbour; one edition and the world; the archive and the practice it records. Neither is first.
The wall between them is common property — traditions are not islands, and a form that crossed a border did not stop being itself. The rings are open, because the archive does not fill the room. The tradition does. The door is open.
What we hold ourselves to
Every claim names where it came from. Where two good sources disagree, we show both and say they disagree. Where nobody has counted, we say nobody has counted — and we print that number on the front page rather than hiding it.
No form is a curiosity and none is a footnote. A weaving town in Kerala and an opera house get the same page, the same fields and the same standard of proof. The seven families are peers, and none is filed under another as a variant of it.
No paywall. No account to read. No cookies, no tracking, no advertising. Everything is published under CC BY-SA 4.0, so you can take it and use it — commercially too — as long as you credit it and pass on the same freedom.
No photograph appears without its photographer, its licence and its source. All three, every time. An image missing any of them is refused at import rather than published and chased later.
How to tell when we do not know
Most archives are confident. This one tries to be legible instead, which means being obvious about its own gaps. Three signals do that work, and they mean the same thing on every page:
- Colour is condition, never category. Where you see a colour on a chart, a map or a badge, it is reporting how a tradition is doing — thriving, stable, fading, critical — and it appears only where a source assessed it.
- Uncertainty is a pattern, never a colour. An unassessed condition is drawn as stripes or a dashed outline, never as a solid swatch, so that “we do not know” can never be mistaken for a fifth category.
- A figure set in monospace has a source. Counts, dates, tiers and identifiers are set in a typewriter face across the whole site. If a number is in that face, something is behind it.
The seven families
Every tradition here belongs to one of seven, and they are peers. A page with no family recorded says so rather than being filed under whichever fits worst.
Where the pages come from
Many begin as a draft composed from Wikidata and Wikipedia under CC BY-SA, which the page states. Every draft passes six checks before it publishes — provenance, concept, citation, licence, substance and decency — and is re-checked on a schedule afterwards. A page that fails the last of those is pulled down rather than queued.
A draft can never assess a condition. That judgement comes from a person reading a source and saying so. The machine can tell you a tradition exists and where it is practised; it cannot tell you how it is doing, and it is not permitted to guess.
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, Openverse and Flickr under Creative Commons terms, and from UNESCO’s intangible-heritage listings where those are cited. Where the data comes from has the full account.
Editions
The same archive, entered from where you are. An edition puts a country’s traditions and its calendar first without walling anything off — every page is reachable from every edition, and the archive is one archive. See all editions.
What this is not
- Not a ranking. Nothing here is scored against anything else. Condition describes a practice’s own trajectory, not its worth.
- Not a marketplace. No bookings, no listings, no promotion. A page about a tradition is not an advertisement for anyone.
- Not a substitute for the practice. A record of a dance is not the dance. The archive exists so that people can find their way to the living thing, not so that the written version can replace it.
- Not a place for closed knowledge. Where a community has said a practice is not to be written down for outsiders, that is the end of it.
Take part
The record is only as good as the people who correct it. How to contribute explains what we can accept and what happens after you send it.