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UK report

Promoting cultural diversity on Wikipedia

By MartinPoulter

Khalili Foundation

Indonesian readers now benefit from a long and detailed translated article on the Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage

This month saw the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development which, for the first time, was celebrated on English Wikipedia's home page. A link in the On This Day section was seen by 4.7 million readers and clicked on more than two thousand times. There aren't any other observation days on 21 May, so I expect the link will appear on the home page each year from now on. Much of my work this month has been on improving articles related to cultural diversity.

I have extended the Cultural diversity article and continued the bold edits to the article on the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Much of the article about the Convention has now been rewritten to be much more accessible, but there is a chunk of text at the start that still needs work. So far I have made 200 edits to the article; since this was a 6,500-word article, overhauling it is a big project. I've made smaller edits to Artistic freedom, Cultural policy, and Cultural expressions. I have also begun a draft on the International Fund for Cultural Diversity.

The Convention was signed on 20 October 2005, so I've added this fact to the articles on 2005 and October 20. Facts for the On This Day section of the front page are drawn from the article about the day, so there is a chance of getting a link to Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions on the front page on a future 20 October.

The Khalili Foundation hosted a celebratory event for the World Day of Cultural Diversity at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, at the climax of its World Festival for Cultural Diversity. In the coming months I will be sharing some media from that event to illustrate articles relating to cultural diversity.

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam was Today's Featured Article on English Wikipedia on May 17, the first TFA from this project. A summary paragraph and image appeared on the front page that day, then a text link was shown for the next three days, getting exposure to around 4.7 million readers each day. Not only did this result in 45,000 click-throughs to the article, but several related articles — Kaaba, Hajj, Mecca, Fard, Five Pillars of Islam, Sitara (textile), Mahmal, Qibla compass, Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage, and British Museum — saw hundreds or thousands of extra views. We seem to have stimulated many readers' interest in Islam and drawn them into exploring a web of related articles. For May 17 we seem to have got five million image views in a 24 hour period. The GLAMorgan stats tool shows 5.4 million image views for Khalili Collections images in the month of May, but this excludes the 4.7 million from the TFA, so for the first time we have hit ten million image views in a single month.

I released a blog post, "Three ways to make links between collections", using Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam as an example of how Wikimedia can be used to make digital surrogates of past exhibitions.

There were five new translations this month:

  1. A volunteer translated a summary of the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam article into Malay.
  2. A volunteer translated a summary of the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam article into Urdu.
  3. A volunteer translated the Muhammad Sadiq (photographer) article into Indonesian.
  4. A volunteer translated a summary of the Muhammad Sadiq (photographer) article into Malay.
  5. A volunteer translated the Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage article into Indonesian.

This is the first content relating to the Khalili Collections on Urdu Wikipedia, and brings the total articles created by this project to 45.

There were no image uploads this month. In the coming month I want to continue improving the cultural diversity articles, but also return to articles about masterpieces in the Khalili Collections, where I have two drafts nearly ready to go.


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