The Khalili Foundation has won the Partnership of the Year award from Wikimedia UK, recognising the impact of the Foundation’s work promoting cultural diversity.
Wikimedia UK, the national charity supporting Wikipedia, works in partnership with many cultural and scholarly institutions to openly share knowledge and culture. Past winners of this award include Edinburgh University, the National Library of Wales, and Amnesty International.
The current partnership with the Khalili Foundation began in February 2020. In that time, the Khalili Foundation’s Wikimedian In Residence, Dr. Martin Poulter, has shared more than one and a half thousand images of art works from the Khalili Collections. The Wikimedian and the Wikipedia volunteer community have together created 90 new Wikipedia articles, and improved many more, in a total of nineteen languages.
As a result, millions of people each month are helped to learn about diverse topics including Islamic art and culture as well as Japanese art. The improved articles cover artists, art works, exhibitions, art forms, and the concept of cultural diversity itself.
The award celebrates the impact of the partnership and especially the current work involving the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register. This project involves the Memory of the World team at UNESCO in Paris and is fully funded by the Khalili Foundation. Working with UNESCO and the Wikipedia volunteer community, the Wikimedian In Residence has shared information about 569 pieces of the most valuable documentary heritage from around the world. This has improved Wikipedia’s coverage of African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture: areas which so far have been relatively poorly documented.
Lucy Crompton-Reid, CEO of Wikimedia UK, welcomed the new collaboration: “At Wikimedia, we are actively seeking to diversify our cultural content, and the Khalili Collections is one of the most geographically and culturally diverse collections in the world. We are proud to be partnering with one of the world’s great preservers of global cultural heritage.”
