GLAM/Newsletter/February 2026/Contents/UK report
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New content in African and Asian languages
Khalili Foundation
There are two new translations this month. For the first time, we have a translation in Ghanaian Pidgin English: a summary article about the Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage. We also have a second article in Western Punjabi: an overview of the Khalili Collections. There are now overviews of the Khalili Collections in five different Wikipedia languages. Ghanaian Pidgin English Wikipedia has just 4,607 articles, so it has acquired an article about a Khalili Collection before articles about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Topkapı Palace, or Bibliothèque nationale de France!
As I was writing this report, a volunteer started translating the Anis al-Hujjaj article into Hausa, the 21st Wikipedia language reached by this project. I will update on this in the March report.
Among the new articles that use Khalili Collections images, there are Western Punjabi articles about the Blue Quran and the Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus, an article about the Futuh al-Haramayn in Ghanaian Pidgin, and a Kiswah article in Tamil, which translates some of the text about textiles that I added to English Wikipedia's article.
The Wikimania conference is in Paris this year. I am involved in two proposed sessions: a short talk about the Interfaith Explorers reuse and review of Wikipedia text, and a workshop about how the Wikimedia movement can work with international organisations.
I am still working through Cambridge University Library (CUL)'s Cario Geniza manuscripts, adding those that are known to be written by Maimonides himself. This month I added eight more manuscripts to Wikidata, plus a representation of the Lewis-Gibson Collection. I also identified places in Wikipedia which could mention the Cambridge manuscripts, and am in touch with the team at CUL about how to proceed. In the course of looking at the manuscripts, I found a public-domain image on Commons that a volunteer had uploaded without giving proper credit to CUL, but is being used across many different Wikipedia articles. This one image is getting about a million views per year. I added the proper credit and link back to the CUL website.
I gave a training session on contributing to Wikidata, not on Khalili Foundation paid time, but used it as a chance to improve Wikidata's cultural diversity. I invited participants to add knowledge about anything they are interested in, but as a suggestion showed them some African and Asian masterpieces from the list in the appendix of the Ahmed & Poulter 2022 paper. As a result, the group created Wikidata entries for Greek Landscape, Female Militia in the Sea, La Terre, Maasai Steppe Ascending—Convective Displacement, The Whirling Dervishes, and Tutu.
Back in January I had a meeting with Shani Evenstein Sigalov who, as well as part of the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, is involved in two research projects around the use of Wikidata for cultural data. We are going to follow up with a meeting in March about how the experience of the Khalili Collections can help inform faster, AI-assisted workflows for adding cultural collections to Wikidata. I am one of many Wikimedians In Residence being interviewed for the project.
Most work this month has been on finishing up the first phase of the Memory of the World project, for which there is a separate report.
The stats server reports 3,772,693 image views for February.
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