Wikidata:WikiProject More authority files in VIAF

This WikiProject aims to encourage authority files created by national libraries and library networks to make their data open and to reconcile them with Wikidata, in order to increase their quality and to ultimately become able to join VIAF.

What is VIAF

See also: Wikidata:VIAF

VIAF members in Europe as of 2025 (the countries in yellow and grey are not VIAF members); outside Europe, VIAF members are in the following countries: * North America: USA, Canada, Québec, (Mexico) * South America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile * Africa: Egypt, Morocco, (South Africa) * Asia: Israel, Lebanon, UAE; Singapore; Japan, South Korea, Taiwan * Oceania: Australia, (New Zealand) The () indicates the countries contributing to the authority file of the Library of Congress.

Working note: add more introductory materials to Wikidata:VIAF and subpages

VIAF is a joint project of several national libraries, operated by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC); every month it clusters milions of authority records regularly provided by its members and contributors. As the quantity and quality of the data improved, clusters may be merged or split. VIAF clusters are linked from Wikidata items through P214.

• List of Wikidata properties for present VIAF members and contributors (SPARQL query on Wikidata) (query)
• Detailed list of VIAF members and contributors (table on English Wikipedia)

VIAF clusters can also be used in Wikidata as a way to find possible conflations and duplications in Wikidata items (cf. Property talk:P214/Duplicates/humans and User:Difool/viaf already somewhere).

Benefits

For the authority file

• Improving its quality, thanks to the quality control provided by Wikidata (and, ultimately, VIAF): Wikidata constraints and queries can be used to find possible mistakes in the authority files, and the community of Wikidata can send manually mistake reports
• Links from Wikidata to the authority file will increase its visibility and its reuse (and data added to Wikidata are also reused by other Wikimedia projects, e.g. Wikipedias).
• Wikidata can be used to extract data and enrich the authority file itself.

For Wikidata

• Improving the quantity and quality of data regarding the entities (persons, organisations, places etc.) described in the authority files of the involved institutions, both through manual work and through semi-automatic imports (QuickStatements, OpenRefine).
• Having direct contacts with the institutions managing authority files allows to establish efficient procedures to report mistakes and obtain their correction (cf. Wikidata:Data round-tripping).

For Wikimedia projects as a whole

• Creating collaborations with the institutions managing these authority files may help establish collaborations (e.g. Wikimedians in residence) spanning also beyond authority files, and potentially involving further data donations and/or contributions to other Wikimedia projects (uploading media files to Wikimedia Commons, writing articles on Wikipedia etc.).

For VIAF

• Incorporating more national libraries will allow to extend VIAF's coverage with names in underrepresented or missing languages and scripts; this will also improve the quality of clusterisations, which are often imperfect for the entities which are only described by foreign authority files (due to duplications, conflations, imprecise transliterations etc.).

Proposed workflow

1. create a subpage of this WikiProject regarding your activity of reconciliation between the authority file of the institution and Wikidata (cf. below #Ongoing projects)
2. (if the authority file of the institution has URIs for the authority records), propose a Wikidata property for it, if it does not exist already (cf. Wikidata:Property proposal)
3. create a Mix'n'match catalog for the authority file of the institution and use it to carefully reconcile the authority records with Wikidata
4. establish a contact with the institution, so that, if you (and/or other Wikidata) find mistakes in the authority records while reconciling them with Wikidata, you can have an effective and stable way to report these mistakes to the institution and have them corrected in a reasonable time; if possible, someone from the institution should be active on Wikidata, so that after solving mistake reports they can also update Wikidata items directly by themselves (cf. Wikidata:Data round-tripping)
5. improve Wikidata items about the persons present in the authority file of the institution, especially adding:
   1. the ID of the authority record of the institution (if it has a Wikidata property)
   2. the VIAF (P214) ID(s) if existent
   3. the labels in the original language (this is especially useful for languages in non-Latin script) and in English; for countries previously being part of the Soviet Union, the label in Russian can help as well
   4. the most important identifying statements: date of birth (P569), date of death (P570), occupation (P106)
   5. the sitelinks to Wikipedia and Wikisource if existent; sometimes these pages already exist but have not been connected yet to Wikidata (this can be checked using PetScan)
6. check very carefully if there are homonym or quasi-homonym persons in Wikidata and add different from (P1889) wherever there is a high risk of confusion
   • if they have already been confused in Wikidata and/or by some authority files, fix very carefully the conflation(s) in Wikidata (cf. Help:Conflation) and try to report all the mistakes to the authority files (cf. again Wikidata:Data round-tripping, and Wikidata:WikiProject Authority control/Error reporting procedures)
7. create a WikiProject for your country (e.g. Wikidata:WikiProject Georgia) with a subpage for its participants and involve users in it (cf. Wikidata:WikiProjects); this could be useful to mention users in discussions of property proposals, or in discussions about complex homonyms
8. convince the institution to make available periodically a dump of the authority file, realeasing it with a clear license (CC0 if possible)

Eventually, the institution can apply to join VIAF (cf. https://www.oclc.org/en/viaf/contributing.html).

For a comparison of VIAF and Wikidata in authority control, you can see this article available in open access: Beyond VIAF. Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries (2021).

For further suggestions about possible ways of reciprocal improvements between authority files and Wikidata, you can see these presentations: Improving catalogues and cataloguing through Wikidata (2024); Wikidata and library authority files (2025); WikiProject More authority files in VIAF (2025).

Ongoing projects

Add here subpages by country to start collecting materials, workflows, best practices, involved users etc.:

• Azerbaijan
• ...

Properties created

• NLAI ID (P13906)
• NVLI ID (P13951)

Involved users

• Geagea (talk • contribs • logs)
• Epìdosis (talk • contribs • logs)

Related projects

General

• Wikidata:WikiProject Authority control
• Wikidata:WikiProject Disambiguation

Cooperations with specific authority files

• Wikidata:Gruppo Wikidata per Musei, Archivi e Biblioteche/SBN (2024-)
• Wikidata:Gruppo Wikidata per Musei, Archivi e Biblioteche/Parsifal (2025-)