Help:Authority control

Wikidata Authority control slide deck in color (project version)

Wikidata Authority control slide deck in grayscale (print version)

Authority Control is a method of doing cataloging. Think of how libraries and museums catalog their collections.

Authority Control Identifiers is a subset of Identifiers. For an identifier to be considered AC it has to meet stricter requirements.

• An identifier can only refer to a single entity, person, thing etc. it may not refer to multiple entities.
• An identifier must also be unique, and must never be reused.
• There must be a single issuer of the identifier, which is sometimes referred to as the "authority".

Following these requirements means the identifiers will not be ambiguous, and they are well-defined. AC identifiers are typically stored along with other metadata in an authority record, and these records are stored together in a database we call an authority file.

In a library AC solves the problem of where you have multiple authors or books that have the same name, this causes conflation. It also solves the issue of authors using pseudonyms, but where both names refer to the same person. By assigning an unique identifier to each book edition or author we avoid this ambiguity.

For more information see Authority Control and Help:Authority control.

Authority Control Help

The following is a draft, a rough estimate to create a graphic, step-by-step help page to explain the transfer of authority control data from Wikipedia pages to newer users of Wikidata. Ideally this might be help text or some other more elegant solution integrated into the User Interface of Wikidata.

In the meantime, there are two slide decks that can be used for

• Authority Control deck (for projection) during a presentation
• Authority Control deck (for printing) to hand out

Click on images at right to go to Commons versions

Step 1

Find the relevant authority control data in a Wikipedia article which is to be transferred to Wikidata.

Step 2

Check to see if a Wikidata item exists already by:

• Looking for "Wikidata item" in the side toolbar of the Wikipedia entry page

• Searching Wikidata for item that might exist but may not be linked to a page

Step 3

Go to Wikidata and click on "Create a new item".

Step 4

Enter label, description and alias.

Step 5

You need to link the Wikidata item to the Wikipedia article.

Step 6

Click on "+ add" to enter a new statement "VIAF".
A pop-up should then suggest "VIAF ID (VIAF) - identifier in the Virtual International Authority File".
Click on this pop-up to select the suggestion, enter the data and click "save".

To add the next element

And so on...

Note

• It is possible to accidentally add a duplicate item; however, don't worry, as there is an automated process that will flag these duplicates, which get fixed: Constraint violations

Continue adding statements

• e.g., P31 ("instance of") => Q5 ("human")

Step 7

Go back to the original article on Wikipedia and delete the authority control data which has now been entered in Wikidata.

You will then see only {{Authority control}}

Step 8: End result