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?