GLAM/Newsletter/June 2026/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue VI, June 2026

UK report

Ninth Good Article from Khalili partnership

Khalili Foundation

There are six new articles with connections to the Khalili Collections this month, and an additional 15 million image views due to images on the front page of English Wikipedia.

I added a new article on the Mughal calligrapher Amanat Khan Shirazi, mentioning his Quran manuscript that is in the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. There were already short articles in Persian and in German, but this is much more comprehensive and was written from scratch rather than a translation. The article passed Did You Know review, and is yet to be scheduled for the front page.

The English Wikipedia article on Yabu Meizan passed Good Article review, becoming the ninth GA from this project. Only about half a percent of articles have the GA badge, which is awarded after a detailed review that examines neutrality, sourcing, and other criteria. Two volunteers were involved in the review process, which identified some places where sourcing could be improved and more detail could be added. After I made the requested improvements, the article passed review and was added to the showcase in the Art & architecture section. A volunteer translated a short summary of the Yabu Meizan article into Persian.

Palermo Quran and Isfahan Quran both appeared in the Did You Know? section of the English Wikipedia's home page, with images. This resulted in just under 15 million image views. The attention resulted in some translations: Palermo Quran was translated into Turkish and Spanish, while Isfahan Quran was translated into Persian and Spanish. I wrote a news item for the Khalili Foundation about my improvements to several Quran-related Wikipedia articles.

I "translated" the Muhammad Sadiq (photographer) article into Simple English. This involved lots of careful re-writing, first using the Hemingway tool to identify sentences that were not Simple English (nearly all of them), then re-writing, then checking again with Hemingway, then doing further passes to shorten sentences and use more simple words. This is the 104th new article created by this partnership and the second in Simple English. As well as adding Sadiq's photographs to his own article, I added them to the Simple English article about the Masjid al-Haram.

Other articles where Khalili Collections images have been added (not a complete list): Names of God in Islam (English), Samarkand Kufic Quran (Slovene).

Martin Poulter and Waqas Ahmed attended Wikipedia's 25th birthday party in London, where Martin was presented with a Silver Jubilee award "for outstanding contribution to open knowledge", presented by Jimmy Wales. This award is for Martin's wiki career since 2011, including volunteer work, his post at the Bodleian Libraries, and present work with the Khalili Foundation.

The Commons Analytics server reports 3,476,711 image views for June. This excludes the views for the two images that spent 24 hours on the front page.

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