GLAM/Newsletter/July 2026/Contents/UK report
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Wikimania report + New articles in Hindi
Khalili Foundation
The total of new articles from this partnership has reached 109 articles in 23 different Wikipedias, thanks to new articles in Hindi and Simple English.
Hero of the month is Muhammad Umar Kairanvi, a Dehli-based contributor for Hindi Wikipedia. Muhammad recently created a lot of new articles relating to Islam, particularly about early manuscript Qurans. Some of them he translated from English Wikipedia. That is how Hindi Wikipedia now has articles on the Palermo Quran, Isfahan Quran, and Falnama. These are the first articles connected to the Khalili Collections in Hindi. In mid-April, there was no mention of the Palermo Quran or Isfahan Quran in any version of Wikipedia; now they have articles in four languages each. Muhammad also translated a summary of the article on the Samarkand Kufic Quran, keeping the same lead image which is of the Khalili Collections folio.
This month I spent a full week at Wikimania in Paris, taking part in discussions about Wikimedians In Residence and about working with UN agencies. I made my first edits on Abstract Wikipedia, creating a page for the Taj Mahal. It is still early days for the project, and I don't think it's yet time to add lots of articles about art works. Since Abstract Wikipedia is driven by Wikidata, the best thing we can do for now is make sure data sets (about the Khalili Collections) are as good as they can be.
I learned about new tools that are being developed and attended a lot of discussion about AI and the nature of the relationship between LLM technology and the "Knowledge is human" approach which is essential to the Wikimedia projects. I tried out the Noesis tool which examines Wikipedia articles for neutrality, and fed back to its creators about getting it to work specifically with English Wikipedia. This could be a valuable research tool for looking at types of bias in Wikipedia topics. Another tool showcased at the conference was WISE (Wikimedia Semantic Search). This image search tool is intended to be more flexible than Wikimedia Commons' own search. Enter a search phrase such as "paintings of the Kaaba" or "Japanese cloisonne" and images from the Khalili Collections will appear, along with images from other collections. Clicking on the thumbnail enlarges the image, then clicking on the title takes you to the full listing for the image. Another tool for exploring Wikimedia Commons images is CommonsWall. During the live demo, the developer clicked on a Khalili Collections image, and showed that the image's category tags such as "Camels in art" could be used to navigate to other images.
I continued the work of improving Simple English Wikipedia, creating a new article on Bibliomancy, mentioning the Falnama and specifically the Khalili Falnama. This involved copying text from English Wikipedia, then carefully rewriting each sentence to reduce complexity.
The article on Amanat Khan Shirazi passed DYK review back in June, but has not yet been scheduled for the front page.
This month I have fixed a lot of broken links in the Khalili Foundation and Nasser Khalili articles. Any substantive changes to the articles are proposed for volunteers to review as part of the Conflict Of Interest process.
I have also spent some time revising and updating the paper on the Memory of the World dataset in response to feedback from the journal editor. The Memory of the World programme has its own update in this newsletter.
The stats server reports 3,358,171 views on images from the Khalili Collections in July.
