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'''Authority control''' is a way of associating a unique identifier to articles on Wikipedia. This is useful to disambiguate different items with similar or identical headings, as well as to establish a single standard title for an item that is commonly known by two or more titles. When used, authority control data links can be found near the bottom of Wikipedia pages, linking to bibliographical records on worldwide [[Library catalog]]s. Authority control is often used on biographical articles because it is quite common for more than one person to share the same name. It is commonly used in other subject material, as well.
Authority control enables researchers to search more easily for pertinent information on the subject of an article, without needing to disambiguate the subject manually. For example, authority control is used on music articles so that the information in the article can be easily cross-referenced with the popular [[MusicBrainz]] database. This enables many media applications to display information about an artist from the relevant Wikipedia article when on of their songs is played.
More generally, [[authority control]] is a method of creating and maintaining index terms for bibliographical material in a library catalogue. The links produced by the [[Template:Authority control|authority control template]] on Wikipedia go to authority control data in worldwide library catalogues. As an example, the Wikipedia authority control information for [[Alexander Graham Bell]] looks like this:
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