GLAM/Newsletter/May 2026/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue V, May 2026

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UK report

Early Qurans on the front page of Wikipedia

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Khalili Foundation

Early Qurans

The work on Quran manuscripts, mentioned in last month's report, has expanded. The new article on the Palermo Quran passed DYK review and has been scheduled for Wednesday 3 June. I wrote a new article on the Isfahan Quran which has already passed DYK review and is scheduled for Wednesday 10 June. This is the 26th new article on English Wikipedia relevant to the Khalili Collections, and the 97th new article across all Wikipedias.

I also made changes to the articles Early Quranic manuscripts, Samarkand Kufic Quran, Afzal Khan Shirazi, Sarai Amanat Khan, and the navigational template Quranic manuscripts.

I have been working on a new article on Amanat Khan Shirazi, the calligrapher of the Taj Mahal, featuring an image of the Quran (QUR 614) that he copied out in the last years of his life.

Events

Martin Poulter and Waqas Ahmed attended the second day of the AI-Bridges symposium at the University of London's Institute of Advanced Study. The day brought together some of the stars of the open knowledge movement, knowledge organisations, and academia to explore whether AI tools can benefit the open knowledge commons. Martin led a discussion about challenges faced by the least-resourced cultural institutions, using examples from the Khalili Foundation's work with UNESCO. Waqas spoke on the closing panel summarising the day.

One of the connections made at AI-Bridges was with Andrew Lih, creator of Wikigraph and Wiki100. We are going to explore creating a similar interactive visualisation of articles related to the Khalili Collections.

A proposed talk about Interfaith Explorers for the Wikimania conference in Paris was rejected. Martin has still registered for the conference, which will have strands about partnerships and cultural heritage on Wikimedia projects.

New articles using Khalili Collections images

This is not a complete list as it is hard to track all uses of these images.

Sura As-Sabà in Catalan
Jaghmini in Turkish
Imperial Household Artist in French (this is a translation from an English article mostly written by me).

I have added some Khalili Collections images to the Early Quranic manuscripts article. The Islamic Art expert Sheila Blair has a Wikipedia article; I added a bibliography along with a relevant image from the Khalili Collections.

Other improvements

I'm grateful to Delphine Montagne, Wikimedian In Residence at URFIST, who saw last month's notice about the French article on the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents. She improved the translation to be more natural French and to better fit French Wikipedia's style.

View statistics

The stats server reports 3,661,280 image views for May.

The article World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development was again linked from the On This Day section on the front page of English Wikipedia on 21 May, getting 1,900 views on the day itself.

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