The Khalili Foundation is partnering with Wikimedia UK to share a unique set of cultural content on and to promote cultural diversity on Wikimedia platforms. The partnership was announced at Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm.
The Khalili Foundation is a UK-based charity promoting interfaith and intercultural understanding through art, culture and education. As part of its cultural philanthropy, it freely shares images and data from the Khalili Collections. The Khalili Collections are eight collections of cultural treasures acquired by Professor Sir David Khalili -each the largest and most comprehensive of its kind. They include:
- Islamic Art (700-2000)
- Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage (700-2000)
- Aramaic Documents (535 BC-324 BC)
- Japanese Art of the Meiji Period (1868-1912)
- Japanese Kimono (1700-2000)
- Swedish Textiles (1700-1900)
- Spanish Damascened Metalwork (1850-1900)
- Enamels of the World (1700-2000)
The partnership involves:
- Sharing more than 1,500 high-resolution images of items from across the eight collections;
- Sharing short lay summaries of research by academic experts that relates to the collections.
User:MartinPoulter is acting as a Wikimedian In Residence for the project from February 2020 onwards.
This is a highly significant partnership in a number of ways. It is globally the first GLAM-Wiki project with a private collection. The collections are mostly about art outside the European/ North American canons. The collected artworks are often the best technical and artistic examples of their era, and they have been digitised with high resolution. There are more than seventy volumes published about the collection, by leading academic experts, that give contextual essays as well as documenting the art works. This information is being used to improve overview articles such as Edo period, Meiji era, Damascening, Japanese lacquerware, and to create artist biographies. At the outset of the project, Japanese decorative arts were poorly represented on English Wikipedia, with some outstanding artists having no biography, and no mention or art and culture in the Meiji era article. Wikimedia also suffered from a paucity of images related to Islam, compared to other major religions.
This project is responsible for:
- 12 DidYouKnows out of 523 Islam-related on English Wikipedia: 2%
- 2 out of 33 Islam-related Featured Articles: 6%
- 3 out of 148 Islam-related Good Articles: 2%