Talk:Khalili Collections

Khalili Collection

Khalili Collection is the normal name (as the titles of the books & exhibitions clearly show), and suits WP preference for singular titles. That redirected to Mr K btw - now fixed. This should really be moved. Johnbod (talk) 01:53, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod: Thanks for spotting and fixing the redirect. The official site itself uses plural- look at the domain and the logo. Using the singular for this article risks confusing the group of collections with an individual collection. Take a look at this library record which distinguishes the Khalili Collections from an individual collection. The books and exhibitions referring to "X from the Khalili Collection" are almost always talking about a specific collection of X rather than the group of eight. MartinPoulter (talk) 21:09, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

A very recent & pretentious rebranding imo, and liable to increase confusion. But whatever. Johnbod (talk) 21:20, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

Loaning galleries and museums: getting the balance right

Loaning items is an important part of collections as it brings them to a larger audience and some collections have portable exhibitions to reach new people. This is the kind of thing that's worth including in an article but the question is how much detail to go into? Given the long list, I can see that it's a lot of information to include. Perhaps there's a way to summarise it graphically? At the moment we have a couple of sentences which I feel could be built on. Richard Nevell (talk) 20:20, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

@MartinPoulter, Philafrenzy, and Johnbod: Richard Nevell (talk) 20:21, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

What is the encyclopaedic value though from the reader's point of view? This article is already 50% lists. Given the significance of the collection there should be scope for more prose. I would suggest no loans unless discussed in depth in reliable sources, only exhibitions composed wholly or almost wholly of items from the collection, and the same for the books. The books could be moved to a separate article? Incidentally, have any COIs been disclosed given his donations to Oxford University? Philafrenzy (talk) 21:13, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

I addded back the touring exhibition that was about 50/50 with the Hermitage, which I think is right (it was also quite a major one, which will have had many reviews). Certainly we could do with more prose, & may get it in the future. Johnbod (talk) 21:45, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

I quite like lists myself, but this one may have been on the long side. The encyclopedic value of such information to a reader is that it shows how the collections connect to other institutions. Richard Nevell (talk) 07:48, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

The encyclopaedic way to present that is to say there have been many loans and give some referenced examples of the significant ones and explain why they matter, as Johnbod proposes. Philafrenzy (talk) 08:00, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Excellent, I'm glad we've moved on from the stage of removing the entire section. Richard Nevell (talk) 17:48, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

@Philafrenzy: Hi! I can reassure you there's no connection between any donations to Oxford University and my work on this article. This process hasn't involved Oxford University at all and I'm doing it in a separate volunteer capacity. I'm grateful to you for preserving the publications list as an article but I think it's better for the reader to have that list in context with other information about the collections. I think most if not all of the eight collections could have their own dedicated articles, since there are so many paper publications about them, so I agree with others that the article as it is now is just a start. I agree with you that the lead was short so I've added a couple of sentences to summarise the later sections of the article. I'm wary of adding more summarising prose in the lead because that would just recapitulate the list of collections which is repeated in the article prose, but if you have other suggestions of what to add to the lead, I'm open to them. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:06, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, it's coming along. It should be split up now really as there doesn't appear to be much in common between the Islamic and Swedish material, for instance, other than the collector. Then we can have everything about each collection on one page including books, exhibitions, loans etc., with one top level summarising article. More work obviously so I am not pressing for it. Philafrenzy (talk) 09:02, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

@Philafrenzy: I'm grateful for you preserving the list of publications as its own article, and aware of the case for it being a separate article, but my preference is keeping the list in this article. The books do typically get reviewed, so there are sources about them, but it's a huge chunk of work to paste those in. The value to a user is in finding out about a collection and getting pointers to the official catalogues, and related monographs, about that collection: they are the next logical sources to consult, whether or not they are presently used as citations in the article. Future expansion of this article, I hope, would draw heavily on those paper publications. The exhibitions are usually notable since, as the publications list shows, there are usually official catalogues published, but I find they are also get some news coverage. So I'd rather keep the whole list for the foreseeable. I agree with John that it's not time now to split the article; that it would need a lot more non-list prose, except perhaps in the case of the Islamic art collection. MartinPoulter (talk) 17:22, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Personally, I think it's rather early to split the article, though there might soon be a case for just splitting out the Islamic collection. But at 4.5 lines for a 50k byte article, the lead is still far too short. Yes, you do need to specify the collections, at the very least, and summarize the rest of the article per WP:LEAD. The rest of the text is long and sprawling, and few will read it, certainly all of it. Johnbod (talk) 16:29, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod: Can you explain more how your idea would work? The prose being summarised is less than 10K. Naming the collections introduces repetition since straight after the lead the eight collections are named. How do you propose to summarise lists, other than the way the article presently does it? MartinPoulter (talk) 17:06, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

It's not "straight after the lead" at all. Ignoring the TOC, "Enamels of the World" (and indeed the word "enamel") only appears at the bottom of the 5th screen down on my pc. You absolutely need to list the collections in the lead. Personally I'd move much of the start of the next section into the lead - but to be clear, I'm not proposing to do anything much myself. Johnbod (talk) 17:27, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

"HIghlights"

A closely related article to this one, Khalili Collection of Japanese Art, has just been through Good Article review. There it was pointed out that "highlights" in an evaluative term, hence not appropriate, neutral style. This word is used in the freely licensed text that was used as the basis for this article, but in hindsight I should have replaced it when adapting the text for Wikipedia. "Highlights" appears four times in the current version of the article, so I'll replace it with neutral wording. MartinPoulter (talk) 11:28, 22 October 2020 (UTC)