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UK report

Khalili project year in review

Khalili Foundation

Sitara from the door of the Kaaba, part of the 2012 Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam exhibition

The Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam article went live, becoming the 35th new article from this project. It passed Did You Know review, becoming the 22nd article from this project to do so, and appeared on English Wikipedia's main page on 31 December. The hook and image were shown to 4.46 million readers, 4,400 of whom clicked through to the article. The hook also generated 2,000 additional clicks through to Sitara (textile), another article from this project. There was also a bump in views for the Kaaba article.

I now have books that will allow me to finish off some draft articles relating to Islamic art. Three new images and a video clip were uploaded this month. Some of this month has been spent on organising two cultural diversity editathons in London and in Oxford and in January I will be mostly focused on final preparations and delivering those events.

The year in review

  • Ordinary image views (excluding views on the front page) have increased to 36.5 million for the year, reaching 4 million per month at the end of the year. Adding in image views from DYK and Featured Pictures (see below) gives roughly 47 million image views total.
  • This year we had one Featured Picture of the Day on English Wikipedia, four on Arabic Wikipedia, and one on Persian Wikipedia.
  • There were three new articles, one of which passed Good Article review.
  • We had three DYKs on the front page of English Wikipedia.
  • Khalili Collections images are now used in 81 Wikimedia sites, up from 71 last year.
  • The images appear in 331 pages on English Wikipedia, up from 261 last year.
  • Images have been added to 302 additional categories on Commons.
  • The Wikidata representation of the Khalili Collections has become more complete and complex, describing literary works of which the Collections have exemplars, and historical people connected to the objects (see this query for objects in collections related to Shah Jahan). There are now 10,503 statements on Wikidata compared to 9,603 at the end of last year. The recent acquisition of printed books will help with progress on this.
  • Views on articles about the Collections: 40,010 in English, 21,774 in other languages

This year's work was more focused on the cultural diversity work of the Khalili Foundation in addition to the objects of the Khalili Collections. This included a six-fold expansion of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity article and a lot of work on a global visual arts task force (analogous to Women In Red, for visual arts outside the Western canon).

The year ahead

  • Edit-a-thon events for the World Festival of Cultural Diversity: we will see how the first two go and there are other possible locations.
  • Building a network of academics and lay people interested in improving under-represented visual art on Wikipedia
  • Contacting GLAM institutions from under-represented cultures and helping them share content in a way that can be used by Wikimedia.
  • Raising awareness of cultural diversity within the Wikipedia contributor community in the wake of the publication (any day now) of the Ahmed and Poulter visual arts paper
  • There are four draft articles relating to Islamic art in various stages of completion. I'll be using book sources to finish them off and publish them.
  • We have done very little exploration so far of creating Wikipedia articles about individual art works. The newly published catalogues cites past publications and show that a number of art works are notable in their own right. These articles will be shorter than most of the articles previously created but there can be more of them.
  • Improving the article about the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, which is incomplete because there is so much to say about this particular collection.
  • There is more to write about enamels and Meiji era art, using images and catalogues from the relevant Khalili Collections.
  • Adding more paintings from the Khalili Collections to the Sum of All Paintings project
  • Adding Wikidata-based interactive visualisations to the Khalili Collections web site. I have already used Wikidata to generate a geographical data set which can be visualised as a map or globe. I will also be working further on embedding interactive timelines like this one.


Check back for a new edition next month.
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