GLAM/Newsletter/October 2025/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue X, October 2025

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UK report

A look at Grokipedia

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Khalili Foundation

Most of the work this month has been on the Memory of the World International Register, which has a separate report.

There is one new article this month: a volunteer translated a short summary of the Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam article into Madurese. This is the first piece of Khalili Collections-related content in this Indonesian language. Madurese is the 19th language in which Wikipedia articles have been created from this project.

Last month I reported that the painting The Giant 'Uj and the Prophets Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (also known as Musa va 'Uj) had been given a Featured Picture award on Wikimedia Commons. This month there was a separate nomination on English Wikipedia, which passed unanimously. As a result, the image has been added to English Wikipedia's gallery of Featured Pictures of paintings, alongside some of the world's most famous paintings. This is the fourth Featured Picture award from English Wikipedia and the 27th Featured Picture award for the Khalili Collections over all.

Among the new articles using Khalili Collections images is an Arabic Wikipedia article about Qajar art which includes this painting of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar.

The stats server reports 4,220,734 image views for October.

I had an online meeting with Sally Latham, the new Education Lead at Wikimedia UK, to talk about Interfaith Explorers. Although her focus is secondary education rather than primary, she will be looking out for contacts who can help us publicise the site to teachers.

Grokipedia

There are many sites that mirror the content of Wikipedia. They do not normally get a mention in a report like this because they only give a different visual presentation of the same content, their views are small compared to Wikipedia itself, and they do not make their view numbers available as open data. Elon Musk's Grokipedia, launched this month, is different in that it takes a subset of English Wikipedia content and claims to "fact check" the articles, making some LLM-driven textual changes, in some cases introducing political bias and misrepresenting scholarly consensus. So it is appropriate to look at how Grokipedia represents the Khalili Collections and ask what Grokipedia's readers will learn about the cultures they document.

The first thing to notice is that Grokipedia has no images, so explains art topics without any examples of the art. It does have external links to some citations, but citation information is patchy and external links at the end of articles (for example, to the official catalogue record of an artwork) have been stripped out. This might change as Grokipedia develops beyond the first version.

On English Wikipedia, there are nine articles directly about the Khalili Collections: an overview article, plus an article for each of the eight collections. There are many other articles which mention the collections, including articles about individual art works, art forms, and three exhibitions. Of the articles about collections, Grokipedia has just one: Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. This is almost exactly the same as English Wikipedia's article, with an additional paragraph at the end that falsely claims that Sir David Khalili won the Commonwealth Peace Prize in 2025. His charitable foundation created and funded the prize; he is mentioned in news stories about it, but is not a recipient.

Most of the articles about non-Western art created or improved by the Khalili Foundation/ Wikimedia project are not present in Grokipedia, but I was able to find the following:

Falnama: this article, including a large section on the Khalili Falnama, is a copy from English Wikipedia, with some citations removed.
Bibliomancy: the section on Bibliomancy in Islam is a copy of what I added to English Wikipedia. There is a full citation for the Rogers book but just a mention of Parikh 2022 without a citation.
Codex Parisino-petropolitanus: this is an almost exact copy of the English Wikipedia article and correctly mentions the folio that is in the Khalili Collections, but has stripped out a lot of the citation details.
Jami' al-tawarikh: Grokipedia's article is longer and more detailed than English Wikipedia's, and written in a noticeably different style. What it says about the Khalili folios seems approximately correct but there are odd phrasings like "the University of Edinburgh's manuscript—split between Edinburgh and the Khalili holdings".

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