Thanks for the feedback everyone.  Not the unambiguous "Use this, it's the best source" answer I was hoping for, but I've got a better understanding of the issues.

Aubrey - The Italian approach sounds good (and I like the position on the page where the VIAF et al identifiers are rendered), but appears to still depend on the inclusion of the {{Controllo di autoritą}} template which is missing in this case http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mujica Not sure if that's just a synchronization issue or something where people need to manually noticed that the data is available in VIAF and include it (seems like a job for a bot).  Also, for Max's example, it only includes one of the two different VIAF identifiers: http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18391

GerardM - The Occitan approach sounds good in theory, but when I look at these two pages currently, they not only don't include the VIAF identifier, but they've got all kinds of other rendering problems. http://oc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Alberto_Mujica http://oc.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell

Max - I'm not familiar enough with the universe of possible technical options or the Wikipedians culture to really have a valuable opinion, but that sounds like it would probably be too aggressive from some of the comments that I've read along the lines of "not sure if I want to invest the time to learn how to edit things in a new (ie Wikidata) way."

Clearly data that's not visible isn't going to get reviewed or corrected.  The trick is to make it visible in a way that makes the local editors still believe they have control.

Tom



On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Tom,

On the Occitan Wikipedia they indicate the VIAF (and other) identifiers are shown from Wikidata. When a new identifier is added, this new identifier will be shown as well. When it is changed it is changed as well.

When information in both Wikidata and Wikipedia is the same, it would be good when the information is removed from Wikipedia (and shown from Wikidata). When there is a difference, the information needs to be verified and the resolution needs to go to Wikidata and sourced. In this way information will gradually become be improved and be available in more Wikipedias.

Yes you can concentrate your efforts on Wikipedia but it will only benefit one Wikipedia. It could do so much more good.
Thanks,
      GerardM


On 16 October 2013 18:34, Tom Morris <tfmorris@gmail.com> wrote:
If I want the most current/accurate VIAF ids, should I be looking at Wikidata or Wikipedia?

When I look at the EN Wikipedia pages for these two topics:


both of which have property P214, the VIAF identifer, the second displays the VIAF identifier, but the first doesn't and the one that does display the identifier appears to be using information from the embedded AuthorityControl template, not Wikidata.

My concern is that if the Wikidata VIAF data isn't being viewed/edit on Wikipedia, it can easily be invisibly wrong like the infamous Persondata template.

Tom


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