Thursday, March 23, 2017

#Wikipedia vs #Wikidata - Quality and low hanging fruit

When Wikipedia is to be the best, it has to understand and preserve its quality. When Wikidata is to be the best, it has to understand and preserve its quality. Both Wikipedia and Wikidata are wikis but their quality and how it manifests itself are utterly different. At the same time they intersect and this is where we find low hanging fruit.

In Wikidata we have "Author"s and subclasses of author. Many of them have a VIAF identifier and this means that libraries know about them. Information like VIAF is shown in the English Wikipedia when there is an {{authority control}} template. It shows nothing when there is nothing to show but it will update Wikipedia when the information is added to Wikidata.

The low hanging fruit:
  • English Wikipedia - All articles about someone who is known as an author of any kind gets the template.
  • Wikidata - For all the items for someone who is known as an author of any kind we seek the VIAF identifier.
  • OCLC - All the libraries in the world will be updated with a link to Wikidata within a month. This will make it easy for a librarian to find Wikipedia articles in any language.
  • Open Archive - It has a project called "Open Library" and it has freely licensed e-books. Wikidata includes Open Library identifiers. OCLC and OL have links combined with Wikidata identifiers. As these numbers include, people in libraries or from Wikipedia could find authors with free books.
  • other Wikipedias - they could include VIAF and OL identifiers as well. Open Library has books in languages other than English..
We live in an interconnected world. Wikimedia quality is in not being on an island but increasing the reach and enabling our readers.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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