"Authority control" refers to controlled (i.e. curated, edited) list of authorities: i.e. authors of works. The issue, then, is metadata that links an image on Commons to the information about the subject in the catalogue of the relevant museum or art gallery.

Jarek is working on templates to make this metadata capture/linkage easier. He wrote about it to a few people. Thought other Wikimedia devs might want to know, so I got his permission to forward his emails. If there's a better mailing list for template discussion, please point me there.

(I'm not going to stay subscribed to this list, and Jarek is not subscribed, so please include him in cc if you reply. Thanks.)

Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation

From: *Tuszynski, Jaroslaw W.* JAROSLAW.W.TUSZYNSKI@saic.com Date: 2011/9/12

Hi,

I am not sure how many of you are familiar with "Vorlage:Normdaten" template on German Wikipedia or "template:Authority control" on English, but it is a mechanism to add metadata to biographical articles which provide links to catalogs of some major libraries (US Library of Congress and German National Library) and online catalogs with links to even more libraries. German Wikipedia has over 171,000 of those and English wiki about 1,700.

Lately, I was working on adding similar templates to Categories and Galleries on Commons, I added about 13,000 by now and expect to have about 20,000 by the end of the week. I think those templates have a lot of potential: 1) They link articles and categories to library catalogs and additional information about people 2) They help with disambiguation problem 3) I think I heard that it also allow some library catalogs (German National Library ?) to link back to Wikipedia articles 4) I think this might help in future mass uploads to help find correct categories on Commons or articles on Wikipedias, since name is not always the best way to find someone. Lately I was trying to link couple thousand painters from http://www.wga.hu/ with categories on Commons and there seem to be no easy way to do it. 5) Those might be especially powerful when combined with QRpedia.

I think we should use this template more widely, especially on EN Wikipedia, Wikisource and other Wikipedias and possibly use it more in GLAM context.

Jarek

Jarosław Tuszyński (user:Jarekt)

.....

I was adding Authority_control templatehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_controlwhich is based on German Normdaten http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage:Normdaten template to categories and articles on Commons. See for example Category:Charles_Fourierhttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Charles_Fourier. The template parameters were copied from German Wikipedia articles whenever I could link them through interwiki links (aka inter-language links).

It is unclear what Info pageshttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Info_pageswere since the effort was abandoned and there are very few of those pages. More successful effort focused on creation of creator templateshttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Creator_templatesbased on creator:template http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Creator. We have about 9,000 of them mostly for artists and writers. Those templates should be fully internationalized (show all text in language of the user). Current version of that template supports PND, LCCN and VIAF codes, and calls Authority_control templatehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control. See for example Creator:Leonardo_da_Vincihttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Creator:Leonardo_da_Vinci, and I will be adding those parameters to many more. ** .....

Yes and no. there are "only" 9,000 creator templates, while we have 113,000 subcategories in Category:People by namehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:People_by_name. I will be adding " Authority control" data to creator templateshttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Creator_templates, which are transcluded in the categories for that person. However that will cover probably less than 10% of People categories. The rest was (and will be) getting an Authority_control templatehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_controldirectly.

....

I can add “NARA” parameter to Authority_control templatehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_controland creator:template http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Creator. However I do not know how to look up those Author IDs. For example I can link tohttp://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalPersonIdSearch?id=1332556 *Ansel Adams record with it s ID: 1332556. But I do not know if there is a way to look up this ID, if I know the name. Or is there a way to search NARA using Library of Congress ID (for Ansel Adams it is n79056359http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79056359.html) ? Without easy way to look it up or ability to download large volume of names with ID’s, this parameter might be rarely used. *

* *

*Jarek*

*(user:jarekt)*