Authority Addicts The New Frontier of Authority Control

Authority Addicts: The New Frontier of Authority Control on Wikidata

Virtual International Authority File ● ● A merged super authority file Algorithmically matching of entities ● First murmurs 1998

Virtual International Authority File ● ● Originally between the Library of Congress (LC) the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) ● and OCLC

And now including

Sample record

Also with experimental imports

Wikipedia as Authority File ● Provides disambiguation of names ● With unique identifiers (URIs)

Wikidata as Super Authority File ● Since it connects many Authority Files – Which are Wikipedias

Comparison of Super Authority Files by size

Matching VIAF and Wikipedia ● ● ● German manual efforts – Matched PND and VIAF and others to de. wiki – ~200, 000 matches VIAF algorithm – Matched VIAF to en. wiki – ~250, 000 matches French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Japanese manual efforts

Merged and migrated to Wikidata

Disagreements

Quality Assurance ● In traditional AC inaccuracies could be reported. – ● Wait and wait. Now, disagreement lead to investigation – And direct resolution on Wikidata – This is a major benefit of Wikidata

And can view differences in content

Label and Alias Fill by bot in 49 languages

The short term implications ● ● Can synchronize the differences ● Improve the quality of both files Improve the completeness of both files

Longer term implication ● ● Coexistence of the two? Is it possible or desirable that Wikidata could replace VIAF?