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UK report

Awards season- again!

By MartinPoulter

Khalili Foundation

The Khalili Foundation won Wikimedia UK's Partnership of the Year award, recognising the institution's work to promote the cultural diversity of Wikipedia, and especially the ongoing work with UNESCO to raise awareness of the Memory of the World International Register.

Wikimedia UK posted the announcement on LinkedIn and the Khalili Foundation has posted a news item.

North African gold dinar, an image recently added to Japanese Wikipedia

I had an online meeting with Farida El-Gueretly (Senior Partnerships Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa region) and Reda Kerbush about the Million Wiki Project, of which Reda is the Grant Committee Director. This funded, multi-year project aims to create a million pieces of information on Wikimedia platforms (Wikipedia articles, Wikidata items, files on Wikimedia Commons...) relating to the cultures of the MENA region. We discussed how both the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register and the Khalili Collections can help with this effort. The MoW register can help to target the most important examples of documentary heritage from the region. The Khalili Collections may be able to share additional images and catalogue data; this is something we will keep in touch about.

Most of the work this month has been on the Memory of the World project, for which there is a separate report.

Japanese Wikipedia has a new article on Gold Dinar, whose lead image is from the Khalili Collections. There are no new articles or translations directly about the Khalili Collections this month.

The stats tools reports 4,116,874 image views this month.

The Cairo Genizah

Wikidata can combine data from multiple collections to answer questions about a historical person or place. There are established guidelines for representing medieval manuscripts in Wikidata, which I had a part in developing. There are presently 189,000 manuscripts known to Wikidata.

I have spent some time adding manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library collections. The book "The Illustrated Cairo Genizah" and the Cambridge Digital Library have both been very useful in identifying important manuscripts and getting authoritative data about them. These records now show up in response to a variety of questions that we can ask Wikidata.

  • This image gallery shows manuscripts in the Taylor-Schechter collection. Some images already exist on Wikimedia Commons, but where they don't exist, clicking on the name of the manuscript will bring up an interactive viewer using the IIIF image format. This means we are getting the images directly from the Cambridge University Library rather than from Wikimedia.
  • A similar display shows manuscripts in the hand of Moses Maimonides. Again, click on the manuscript name rather than the image.
  • When we ask for an image gallery of manuscripts depicting a menorah, we get one of the Taylor-Schechter manuscripts, with a link to its catalogue record in Cambridge Digital Library.
  • Asking Wikidata for Yiddish manuscripts, it now returns the Cambridge Yiddish Codex.


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