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UK report

Using Wikipedia in interfaith education

By MartinPoulter

Khalili Foundation

Textile artwork from the Khalili Collection of Japanese Art: one of this month's 5 new uploads

The main activity this month has been the Interfaith Explorers improvement project, so there has been slower progress on other fronts. Interfaith Explorers is a site created by the Khalili Foundation to support primary and secondary religious education, so far covering the Abrahamic religions. We are adding in introductory text, mainly from Simple English Wikipedia, to introduce concepts and make the site more useful to learners. I have been extracting text from Wikipedia articles, simplifying it, and building up a list of glosses of central topics, along with the attribution statements that allow us to reuse the text. These have been reviewed by experts who have identified issues including problematic oversimplifications, high reading level, and Christianity-as-default. They have also provided a list of topics that the site ought to cover. Informed by this feedback, I have been adapting more succinct text from Simple English Wikipedia, mindful that some topics need extended explanations. I have liaised with the Interfaith Explorers site designers about how the design can represent non-Abrahamic religions, and how we can incorporate attribution statements so that we comply with Creative Commons licences.

Some wiki-related work that is lower-priority but continuing:

  • Good Article review of Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands: The reviewer has suggested a lot of improvements to the article. I've made the smaller changes straight away; the larger changes will take more time and the review itself might need to be postponed until I have time for it.
  • Preparing an article on the Samurai Shokai company: I have continued to expand the draft, which is getting nearer to being ready to be published as an article.
  • Editathons: I'm still hoping to do an event in Bristol and I am going to follow up with my contact at University of Edinburgh about doing a student editathon.
  • Conferences: I have registered for Wikimania (Katowice, Poland in August), where I have my own talk about working across languages and am due to appear on a Wikimedian In Residence panel and in a GLAM workshop. The main point of being visible in this conference is to enthuse a wide audience of Wikipedians with the Foundation's forthcoming work with UNESCO. This month I also put in a talk proposal for the Museums + Tech conference in December about how the Khalili Foundation engages Wikipedia volunteers. I will learn whether that was accepted in mid-August.
  • Publicity and social media: Wikimedia UK recently got a new Head of Communications. We've met online and also exchanged emails about how Wikimedia UK can continue to support this partnership with co-ordinated social media publicity.

Wikimedia UK hosted "Let's culturally diversify the Internet", a blog post that I edited from a talk I gave in February.

I had an online meeting with some of the Wikimedians of the United Arab Emirates user group. They are organising a year-long competition in which they translate text into Arabic related to a collection, and they have selected the Khalili Islamic collections. I have given them lists of Wikidata items, Wikimedia Commons file descriptions, and Wikipedia articles that they could translate.

There were five new image uploads, of textile artworks from Meiji-era Japan.

I dedicated some time earlier in the month to fix a problem with the Indonesian article on Sitaras. There were lots of errors, broken links, and code that wasn't being properly rendered, including the image gallery. I tried to fix the code directly, but a vandalism detector rejected my edits. I worked with a volunteer via Indonesian Wikipedia's Embassy to identify the problems and get them fixed. I fixed similar (but less drastic) code problems with the Igbo article about Muhammad Sadiq and a couple of other translations. I also fixed an issue affected all the Khalili Collections articles on English Wikipedia. A link to a page on the Khalili Collections website had been marked as dead (it had moved, not disappeared), so I made sure each article now has an active, correct link.

There is one new translation this month: volunteer Nikson Alexander translated the Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands article into Russian, which is apt since that exhibition was a joint venture between the Khalili Collections and the Hermitage Museum. This brings the number of languages in which we have created new articles to thirteen. GLAMorgan reports 4,678,031 image views in June; fewer than last month, but there is always a drop over the summer.

Empire of the Sultans has been scheduled as Today's Featured Article for English Wikipedia on Tuesday 23rd July, for 24 hours from 1am UK time.


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