The Khalili Foundation

The Khalili Foundation is an international charity that builds intercultural and interfaith relationships through educational and cultural activities. Its founder, Sir David Khalili, has amassed the Khalili Collections: eight art collections totalling 35,000 objects, including the world’s largest private collection of Islamic art. As part of its cultural philanthropy, the Foundation works with many different platforms, including Wikimedia UK.

The partnership between the Khalili Foundation and Wikimedia UK was initiated in 2019 by Waqās Ahmed, Executive Director of the Foundation. Dr Martin Poulter was appointed as Wikimedian In Residence. Martin is freely sharing images and data from the collections, improving Wikipedia’s coverage of topics from Islamic pilgrimage to Japanese fashions.

The partnership with the Khalili Foundation has facilitated an incredible wealth of cultural information and research being added to the wiki projects, with a particular focus on non-western art. It has also led to research projects in which Martin and Waqās investigate cultural gaps on the Wikimedia projects. Their first research project, funded by Wikimedia UK, focused on the visual arts. It was expected that Wikipedia would show a bias in coverage of art towards the Western canon over art from other cultures, but the extent of the bias discovered by their paper, even on Asian-language Wikipedias, was surprising. Some of this bias is a result of where the majority of Wikimedia’s contributors reside. Another reason is the difficulty of finding images and research from outside the well-resourced European and North American institutions.

Martin and Waqās’ research not only measures this cultural gap, but shows what the wiki communities and wider cultural sector need to do to improve the coverage of non-western art. They have identified “target articles”, artists and masterpieces from many different cultures whose Wikipedia articles need to be created or improved, and for which more freely reusable images are needed.

The Khalili Foundation partnership is now enacting the paper’s recommendations: raising awareness of the cultural gap among wiki volunteers, organising student editathon events, and encouraging other cultural institutions to share their art on Wikimedia platforms. The Khalili Collections have become an example to the sector in this regard; one and a half thousand high-quality images and more than a thousand items of data are available for use in Wikipedia and other educational platforms, and are presently used in seventy different languages. Content from the partnership has been recognised as high quality by the wiki communities, with seven Good Article awards and eighteen Featured Image awards.

This partnership not only diversifies and improves Wikipedia, but also exposes the Khalili Collections and the Foundation to an enormous online audience. The shared images presently receive around three million image views per month: far more than would be possible through visitors to exhibitions.