It woud be great to have keys into other databases from Wikidata. I'd be happy to contribute Freebase IDs to matching Wikidata concepts. However, I'm wondering if it really makes sense to have a separate property for every type of ID. Shouldn't it be modeled more like interwiki links so that each concept has many foreign keys each with an associated data source. That's how we've modeled it in Freebase and it scales quite well.

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Klein,Max <kleinm@oclc.org> wrote:

> > I think it would be good to make clear which specific content
> > additions will be possible in future. I think we should have a list
> > which states what content will be in next deployment and what content
> > will be later on. I read somewhere about Link_FA, Link_GA, but also
> > IMDb, IBDB, VIAF, but also of course Commons. A lot others are too on
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control
>
> Neither of those will be in the next deployment. It is pretty certain
> that all of them will be possible at some point.
>
> > Currently VIAF is in discussion and willing to be added on some
> wiki's, but with Wikidata it can be done much easier. Any plans for it?
>
> Linking to a VIAF id? That will be possible. I can't tell you when.

It is probably time for me to chime in on this, as the author of VIAFbot which just pushed 250,000 links on English Wikipedia. (BTW, if you want to see in-depth statistics I've written a blog post about it http://hangingtogether.org/?p=2306).

I've been receiving a lot of emails asking to replicate VIAFbot on different Wikis (Commons, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish) and my reply has always been that the most important next step is to write Wikidata. The only thing that needs to be possible on the Wikidata side is to be able to write properties, because a VIAF ID is a property of a Wikidata cluster.

Then my plan is to run through the lists of pages that transclude any authority control template {{en:Authority control}} /Union {{de:Normdaten}} /Union {{fr:Autorite}} /Union {{it:Bio}} / Union {{commons:Creator}} and load the interwikis for each link. Then find or create the Wikidata concept for that multilingual cluster. If all the different sources are in agreement, write a VIAF ID property, and if there is disagreement use the Wikidata 'source' method to note which language thinks what.

Since VIAFbot was written in pywikipediabot, and pywikidata exists I think the bot will be relatively easy. How do I apply for a bot flag on Wikidata?
>
>
> Cheers
> Lydia

Cheers,
Max

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