I am an inactive volunteer (at present and been so for a while now), chanced upon this thread. In the past one of the projects I worked upon and was hoping would see light of day, some day, was release of thousands of India related images by the British Library under a free license. These images are part of our Indian national heritage and are of educational and cultural importance. They are from the 17th to the 20th century and include oil paintings, murals, portraits, photographs etc.
In 2014 I was in London for Wikimania, with the help of Jon Davies (then ED), Jonathan Cardy and Andrew Gray we had a meeting at BL and there was a serious effort to make this a reality but it was just about the time other things took precedence in personally
for me and Wikimedia went on the back-burner. I attempted to revive talks on my visit to London last summer, in vein.
If anyone is willing to take this up, I would be most happy to share all the correspondence and minutes of meetings from the past (offlist) as well as try to put them in touch with BL (though WMUK might be better at the latter) and try to help out where possible, though I have severe time constraints which would prevent me from playing an active part in such an attempt.
Regards,
On 08 February 2017 at 12:46 John Lubbock <john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
There's quite a lot of interest in this subject also because of the BBC series Taboo, which paints the East India Company in a pretty bad light that is quite believable given what is known about themI think Taboo is great, at a graphic novel sort of level. People should know, though, that the East India Company was run by a board of 25 directors, rather than Jonathan Pryce doing a lot of swearing.
Among interesting employees were John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Love Peacock.
If anybody wants a somewhat long but illuminating read on them, I'd very much suggest the historian William Dalrymple's piece in the Graun from a couple of years ago.I don't know that Dalrymple is taken seriously as a historian. I recently enjoyed In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles, by Nigel Barley, which complements Taboo in its own way.
Personally, I do think that if possible we should look at the possibility of bringing this collection onto Wikimedia projects, but I don't think it would be an appropriate project for trying to work with the Indian Wikimedia chapter or with the Indian diaspora here. I do think we should look at how we could do that in future with subject matter which is less contentious though.
For heavens sake, WP has the mechanisms for dealing with contentious subjects. Communications being what they were, until the invention of the telegraph, there was a big disjunction between what the Company could get done from London; and what actually went on in South and East Asia. And what UCL are working on for the West Indies, someone should attempt for the East Indies.
Charles
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