  We report on the experimental observation and characterization of a
six-photon entangled Dicke state. We obtain a fidelity as high as
0.654$\pm$0.024 and prove genuine six-photon entanglement by, amongst others, a
two-setting witness yielding -0.422$\pm$0.148. This state has remarkable
properties; e.g., it allows obtaining inequivalent entangled states of a lower
qubit number via projective measurements, and it possesses a high entanglement
persistency against qubit loss. We characterize the properties of the
six-photon Dicke state experimentally by detecting and analyzing the
entanglement of a variety of multipartite entangled states.
