2017-12-12 11:49 GMT+01:00 Brill Lyle <[email protected]>: > Hi all, > > I understand this is probably outside the scope of Wikidata-l, but I am > looking for advice in what I am noticing is a somewhat re-occuring issue > with VIAF identifiers. > > For a lot of items, I am finding 2 or more VIAF numbers for BLP subjects. > > Recently I've found up to 4 VIAF numbers: > - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q45311838 > - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q45311745 > > Is there coordination between Wikidata and VIAF that is automated and fixes > things like this. > > I don't want to remove some of these VIAF numbers as they are tied to > "legit" authority bodies. I understand there is often a "main" VIAF > number...
Dear Erika, AFAIK the problem should be solved VIAF-side. The problem is that most of the National Library Systems that give data to VIAF are *not* coordinated among themselves - in fact, VIAF was born to solve this problem, then came Wikidata that helps VIAF finding more and more duplicates in its database. Until some time ago, there was a Wikimedian in residence taking care of all Wikidata (and all other Wikimedia)-related things, but I don't know if it's still the case or not. I think I remember that he left, and was replaced by somebody else, but then I don't know if we still have somebody there and/or there is this coordination, even if there should be one (as in "there should be already some sort of coordination", but also as in "the two databases MUST talk to each other"). What I know is that whenever a duplicate is solved VIAF-side, a bot runs into Wikidata and removes the deleted record. How often this happens, I don't know. My suggestion is to NOT remove those duplicates, since they are all legit (for the time being). This does not solves the 8242 "single value violations" problem[1] we have at the moment, but we might want to talk to OCLC about this. If you need help, or if I can be of help, please let me know. [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Database_reports/Constraint_violations/P214#"Single_value"_violations -- Luca "Sannita" Martinelli http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
