Wikipedia:Authority control integration proposal: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:41, 25 June 2012

Revision as of 15:47, 26 June 2012

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{{underconstruction}}

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|disamibguatedisambiguate]] 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, right back to the develpoment of the [[Dewey Decimal Classification]] in 1876. 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.