Wikipedia:Authority control integration proposal: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:30, 12 December 2012

Latest revision as of 03:21, 25 April 2021

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{{Superseded|[[Wikipedia:Authority control integration proposal/FAQ|the project FAQ]], as '''the project ishas now activeconcluded'''}}

{{Notice|If you've '''found an error''' with one of the VIAF codes added, please [[Wikipedia:VIAF/errors|list it here]].}}

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==Introduction==

This proposed project intends to extend and systematise the use of [[authority control]] identifiers, using the {{tl|Authority control}} template, on English Wikipedia articles. ''Authority control'' is the [[term-of-art]] in librarianship, archival practice and related fields for [[unique identifiers]] to [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation|disambiguate]] objects (people, places, academic subjects, etc.). These fields of study have different conceptualisations of unique identifiers form some other fields because many systems in place are backwards-compatible to pre-computerisation systems. This project aims to connect the English Wikipedia to this [[long tail]] of identifiers.

The current proposal focuses on biographies, although this may be extended in future to cover other topics, and is built around the use of data from [[VIAF]], a composite system bringing together several major authority files. VIAF algorithmically matches and clusters entries from the individual authority files, and uses data scraped from Wikipedia to aid the process; as a result, there have already been a large number of Wikipedia-VIAF matched pairs identified and this provides a very effective springboard to work from.

The proposal was originally written up here, and [[Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 89#section Authority Control Integration|discussed on the Village Pump [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)&oldid=499166049#Authority_Control_Integration here]]. It has since been updated to include some of the feedback and commentary received during the discussions. While the Village Pump discussion was broadly favourable, it has been formally listed as an RFC in order to ensure clear support from the community before implementation later in 2012.

This plan is being coordinated by [[User:Maximiliankleinoclc|Max Klein]], the Wikipedian in Residence at [[OCLC]], and [[User:Andrew Gray|Andrew Gray]], the Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library. OCLC are the central operating group for VIAF, and have offered to provide technical support for the matching process. If you would like to help work on it, please [[Wikipedia talk:Authority control integration projectproposal|let us know]].

==Background==

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*'''Returning metadata to the outside world''' - working backwards from this, once we have embedded identifiers, the curators of this metadata will find it a lot easier to incorporate information from Wikipedia, taking advantage of our fairly fast update cycle for things like death dates.

*'''Identifying alternate names''' - particularly for non-standard transliterations, the alternate headings in authority files give us an extensive and curated collection of variants of names. The linkage will help the creation of redirects.

*'''Content creation support''' - the presence of the identifiers allows future work on tools to, ege.g., develop scripts to generate author's bibliographies for articles.

Currently, around 4,000 articles on the English Wikipedia have some form of embedded authority control identifier, and on Commons, around 45,000 articles contain authority control. On the German Wikipedia, by comparison, [[:de:Wikipedia:Normdaten|around 220,000 articles]] have embedded identifiers.

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{{Wikipedia:Authority_control_integration_proposal/FAQ}}

If the community RFC decides not to go ahead with the project, we'll still be able to pass the data generated so far to the Wikidata team, and hopefully it can be used there.

Any comments, criticisms, etc. [[Wikipedia:Authority control integration proposal/RFC|gratefully received]].

- [[User:Maximiliankleinoclc|Max Klein]], OCLC Wikipedian in Residence, and [[User:Andrew Gray|Andrew Gray]], British Library Wikipedian in Residence.

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==Progress==

Now that [[Wikipedia:Authority_control_integration_proposal/RFC|RFC]] has passed, the taskwork of writing the bot is underway. Code can be viewed at [https://github.com/notconfusing/VIAFbot github], and is scheduled for completion by end of August 2012.