GLAM/Newsletter/March 2024/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue III, March 2024

UK report

A small problem with the Ottoman Empire

Khalili Foundation

The Featured Article review for Empire of the Sultans still continues and has involved me substantially changing the Background section that introduces the reader to the Ottoman Empire. A reviewer pointed out that a map of the empire (the only image in the article not provided by the Khalili Collections) was not properly sourced. There was a properly-sourced alternative, but its text labels are hard to read. So I have had to recreate the map in the SVG format to make the text more legible and to make it easy to internationalise.

Wikimania 2024 will take place in Katowice, Poland in August. I have put in a session proposal to show how, in my Khalili Foundation work, I use various tools to track and promote cultural diversity across multiple versions of Wikipedia.

I have been working on a project to adapt text from Simple English Wikipedia and English Wikipedia in educational materials that are published by the Khalili Foundation. I created a spreadsheet into which I can post Wikipedia links and which automatically generates an attribution statement. In this spreadsheet, I have adapted Wikipedia text to create short explanations of a dozen topics. As part of this work, I have also been working on a calendar of religious events for the coming five years.

The Cultural Content newsletter is publishing my article on Thursday 4 April at lunchtime. This describes how I represented the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam exhibition in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and offers it as an example of how the cultural heritage sector can make use of these platforms.

I have worked with Khalili Foundation staff to create a web page which clarifies the copyright licence of some images that have been shared on Commons, and which makes some new images available under a Wikimedia-compatible licence; these will be uploaded early in April.

Among the Khalili Collections uploads on Wikimedia Commons, there are images of important religious significance. I have added a template to all of the Islam-related images prompting users to show respect to the religious and cultural context from which these images came.

There is one new article this month: the Falnama article, greatly expanded by this project, has been translated into Persian, including the section about, and images from, the Khalili Falnama. GLAMorgan reports 6,126,483 image views in March.

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