GLAM/Newsletter/May 2024/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue V, May 2024

UK report

Our first Igbo language article

Khalili Foundation

Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands appeared in the Did You Know section of the English Wikipedia home page on 19 May; the 26th DYK from this project. There were 4.6 million visits to the Wikipedia home page, where there was a link and thumbnail image. 10,701 people followed the link to the Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands article. About 900 followed the link from there to the article about the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. There seem to be hundreds of extra visits for other linked articles including Blue Quran and Islamic art.

After nearly three months of being reviewed, the Empire of the Sultans article became a Featured Article: the second FA on English Wikipedia from this partnership. As a result, it is now showcased at various places around English Wikipedia, including the Islam portal and the Arts portal. It has not yet been scheduled for Featured Article of the Day, but this will probably take place on 23 July.

A volunteer has translated the article I wrote about Muhammad Sadiq into Igbo, a Nigerian language spoken by 31 million people. Of the 56 new articles created by this partnership, this is the first in Igbo and might be the first mention of the Khalili Collections anywhere in Igbo! This brings the number of languages in which this project has created new Wikipedia articles to twelve.

The Islam WikiProject keeps records of all DYKs, Good Articles, and Featured Articles that have anything to do with Islam. So I thought it would be interesting to express this partnership's successes as a proportion of those figures, keeping in mind that improving articles about Islam is just part of what this project is about. In the past I have observed that out of three Featured Pictures of Islamic religious art on Wikimedia Commons, we provided two; we're responsible for 67% of that category of featured content.

12 DYKs out of 523 that are Islam-related: 2%
2 out of 33 Islam-related Featured Articles: 6%
3 out of 148 Islam-related Good Articles: 2% (with another article awaiting review)

Considering that this is comparing my work on this partnership to all the work ever done to create quality content related to Islam on English Wikipedia, I think these are significant numbers.

This month, I worked on a history of the Samurai Shokai company. The Khalili Collections have two enamel cabinets credited to the company, appearing in this month's two image uploads. I have also created Wikidata representations of the cabinets (here and here). I have carried out an analysis of the images on the Khalili Collections website, to find any that have not yet been uploaded to Wikimedia. This has brought up ten images of Meiji Japanese art which I will soon upload.

While remotely taking part in a University of Cambridge event on faith and peacebuilding, I noticed that, while Wikipedia makes it easy to navigate between articles related to pacifism and the anti-war movement, it's harder to navigate between articles relating to peacebuilding. To help with this, I created a Peace navigation template that links concepts such as Religion and peacebuilding, Environmental peacebuilding, and Peacemaking, as well as regional topics such as Arab–Israeli normalization or the Northern Ireland peace process. The effect on the traffic for those articles is hard to detect so far (coming at a time when a lot of universities are ending their terms) but hopefully this makes Wikipedia a little bit better for researching peacebuilding.

The GLAMorgan tool reports 5,071,362 image views for Khalili Collections images in May. This is additional to the above-mentioned 4.6 million image views from the DYK.

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