GLAM/Newsletter/February 2024/Contents/UK report
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National Trust, Leeds 2023, and Khalili Foundation
National Trust
The National Trust's pilot Wikimedia programme has come to an end. This was a new approach for the organisation, and the first time they openly licensed images (take a look). They include popular objects and some images of heritage conservation in practice. The pilot also introduced volunteers to editing and developed some guidance for staff. If you have comments on the pilot, or its potential, please add them to the talk page.
Thanks are due to the wider team at the NT for making the pilot possible and to all the Wikimedians working in GLAM who provide inspirational models and projects that I've drawn on.
LEEDS 2023
Khalili Foundation
This month I have worked on a report on the Wikimedia representation of the UNESCO Memory of the World inscriptions, identifying areas that we can improve with UNESCO's co-operation. One finding was that the Commons categorisation of images is rather mixed up, and does not give us an accurate picture of how many images on Commons are of MotW inscriptions. This is one thing that I will need to work on as the Khalili Foundation works with UNESCO to open up knowledge about Memory of the World.
I have also been looking a how material from Wikimedia could be used to augment the Interfaith Explorers educational site (supported by the Khalili Foundation), and have written a proposal for sharing with the site's maintainers.
Georgina Brooke, one of the contacts from my University of Oxford days, has been in touch. She runs Cultural Content, a blog aimed at cultural heritage professionals. I have written a guest article for her that explains the Khalili Collections Wikimedia project and how I was able to write an article about the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam exhibition and get it to Featured Article status. We have agreed that this article can be published with a free licence.
On English Wikipedia, I have put Empire of the Sultans up for Featured Article candidacy. Already a couple of dozen improvements have been suggested and implemented. The main suggestion is that the article needs to explain more context about Islamic art and Ottoman art, drawn from academic sources rather than sources specifically about the exhibition. So this is taking some time and there will have to be input from other reviewers before it is ready. Using Wikipedia to look for sources, I found big problems with the Aniconism in Islam and Muslim world articles, where citations had been incomplete for years. So I spent some time fixing those problems.
To further the possibility of running cultural diversity editathons, I have arranged a meeting with a historian of art at the University of Bristol in mid-April. There has also, with help from Wikimedia UK, been an approach to the Institute for Arab and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter.
We have some new translations. Two volunteers on Indonesian Wikipedia have translated the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art article and the Empire of the Sultans article: both very long, richly illustrated articles. The Talismanic shirt article has been partially translated into Indonesian and into Malay, including an image shared from the Khalili Collections.
There were no new image uploads and no new Featured Image awards this month. GLAMorgan reports 7,154,543 image views in February. The number is so high because of a surge in interest in Alexander the Great, whose article has two images from two different Khalili Collections, and also in Achaemenid Empire which has one Khalili Collections image.
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