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A tenth-century Quran and Islamic Art in Urdu
Khalili Foundation
Progress on a variety of fronts this month: a new article about a Quran, our first Simple English article, and new articles in Persian and Urdu using images from the Khalili Collections.
The Khalili Collections have more manuscripts (or manuscript folios) of the Quran than any other private collection. Some of these Qurans have their own scholarly literature and Wikipedia articles, including the Blue Quran and the Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus. I noticed this month that the Palermo Quran, of which two sections are in the Khalili Collections, is mentioned in multiple scholarly sources. So I created a new article about it using images that were already uploaded. This now awaits Did You Know review. I've also created new representations of the manuscript and its parts on Wikidata, meaning that if we ask Wikidata for tenth-century exemplars of the Quran or for Arabic manuscripts in Kufic script, it will include the Palermo Quran in the results.
Speaking of the Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus, a volunteer has translated its English article into Persian, mentioning the Khalili folio and including the image from the Khalili Collections. In Kurdish Wikipedia there is now a short article about cultural diversity, translating material that I added to the English article. Another volunteer has created a short article in Urdu about the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, translating a summary of the English article.
I am experimenting with "translating" articles for Simple English Wikipedia. Simple English is useful to a huge international community of non-native English speakers, as well as for native English speakers who find English Wikipedia difficult. As a first step I have created a Simple English article about the Anis Al-Hujjaj. This involved manually simplifying the text and using automated tools to measure its complexity and identify sentences to improve. The total number of Wikipedia articles directly related to the Khalili Collections created by this project has now reached 96.
The article I created about the Japanese artist Yabu Meizan is quite a high-quality article but has not yet got any quality awards. I have made some improvements and submitted the article to Good Article Review. The added text in the article created space for another image of a Meizan art work from the Khalili Collections.
The French article about the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents had a few problems: it was tagged for lacking citations and the same image was included twice. Although my French isn't great, I managed to put in all the citations and replace an image.
The Department of Education updated their website, and their link to Interfaith Explorers was mistakenly taken down. I got in touch with them and got them to restore the link. Thinking ahead to the next phase of content for Interfaith Explorers, I have acquired a couple of books for children about Dharmic religions, including one aimed at Key Stage 3, and downloaded the Collins teacher guides for Key Stage 3. These resources 1) help identify which concepts are appropriate for that educational level, 2) are a guide to appropriate language for that level, and 3) can be used to fact-check candidate text.
The stats server reports 3,660,839 image views for April.
- From the team
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- Nigeria report
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