VIAF identifies a variety of things, including people, pseudonyms, organizations, places, etc. There is no intentional distinction between those things and their “identity”.

 

Jeff

 

From: Wikidata <wikidata-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of "leadsong@webname.com" <leadsong@webname.com>
Reply-To: "Discussion list for the Wikidata project." <wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 11:14 AM
To: "wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org" <wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikidata] Identifiers: Multiple VIAF numbers

 

That's because P214 should be a property of an identity, not of a person. We conflate the two concepts at our peril. One person can have multiple identities, aliases, pseudonyms, characters, roles, jobs, etc. Sometimes the same identity is adopted by multiple people, either sequentially or simultaneously: "I am Spartacus!", "John Bull", "G.I. Joe", "POTUS", "The King is dead, long live the King!", "Editor in Chief of the New York Times", ...

LeadSongDog

Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 8:13 AM
From: "Thad Guidry" <thadguidry@gmail.com>
To: "Discussion list for the Wikidata project." <wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikidata] Identifiers: Multiple VIAF numbers

 

2. Single value violations

I don't understand this at all. Apologies, I feel very dumb but would appreciate maybe a general, non-tech speak explanation if someone might be so kind.

 

 

It's explained here:

 

It means that the "VIAF Identifier" P214 property can only have 1 value.  But you can treat this as a warning really because you will be loading multiple VIAF identifiers for the same person...and getting VIAF to merge or cleanup later...which hopefully bots will then pickup and handle the extra identifiers being deleted..

 

-Thad

 

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