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UK report

Leeds Museums & Galleries, the British Library and the Khalili Collections

By Lajmmoore, EriedgenArc & MartinPoulter

Leeds Museums & Galleries

Rather than a monthly update, this is a long overdue summary of the work that's been ongoing at Leeds Museums & Galleries over the past 18 months. Apologies for not updating here previously - where does the time go?

  • In 2019 we ran a number of in-house "first editing steps" sessions for curatorial colleagues; we also recruited a project placement (User:Leedsproject2019) to start exploring the potential of our collections to add biographies to address gender gap, etc.
  • In 2020 we ran our first Wikithon - one at Leeds Industrial Museum on women in industry; Leeds Art Gallery also did a scoping exercise to see which how many artists from the collection were present here; we also introduced some volunteers to editing who are making changes to existing pages; we also collaborated with Leeds Libraries and the British Library on the Women in Leeds event.
  • In 2021, one volunteer's first new page was accepted (Violet Crowther) and we are hoping to run further training in the future as we know there's a keen appetite; we're also keen to explore ways we might be able to add images of our collections to Commons (slowly, tentatively and with thought) later in the year; we're also keen to hear from people with experience to share, since we have no official Wikipedian.

We're looking forward to the year ahead, potentially with the idea of getting more of our volunteers involved.

British Library: New Beginnings

This was the first month of my residency as the new Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library. As such, a number of introductory meetings have been held and we are looking forward to a productive year ahead!

Since the start of the month, a few things have happened:

  • An introductory blog, with links to my profile page and Twitter account was published on the Digital Scholarship blog;
  • We have been engaging with IFLA’s Wikidata interest group on collaborative plans for an event in May, as well as drafting a new introductory zine for Wikimedia beginners;
  • We were delighted to attend the launch of the latest Art+Feminism edit-a-thon with the University of Arts London and ARLIS;
  • We met with the India Records Office to discuss an upcoming project on Wikisource and Wikidata utilising a sample set of records from Bengal;
  • From 15 March – 14 April 2021 the Two Centuries of Indian Print project is running a competition to proofread text from Bengali books digitised by the project, now hosted on Wikisource. This is in partnership with the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group. In the first two weeks of the competition more than 1,000 pages have been worked on by contributors. The project hopes to engage more with this group in the coming year to events to broaden awareness, knowledge and use of Wikis in South Asia.

Khalili Collections

Sitarah (ornamental curtain) for the Prophet’s Mosque, made in Istanbul, 18th century

There were 23 new images uploaded up to 1 April, plus three higher-resolution versions of previously-uploaded images, plus three cropped versions of previously-uploaded images. The new images are related to Islam and the Hajj. The bulk upload of hundreds of Islamic art images is expected in June.

The biography of Spanish metalworker Plácido Zuloaga passed Good Article Review, making it the second GA from this project. The Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage article appeared on the Did You Know section of English Wikipedia and a volunteer translated a summary of it into Arabic, creating the 23rd new article from this project. The 24th new article is Sitara (textile), about sacred textiles used in Mecca and Medina.


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