[Commons-l] [en] linking metadata on Commons (template design & usage)

[Sumana Harihareswara]

"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 at 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
template<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control>which
is based on German Normdaten
<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage:Normdaten> template to categories
and articles on Commons. See for example
Category:Charles_Fourier<http://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
pages<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Info_pages>were since
the effort was abandoned and there are very few of those pages. More
successful effort focused on creation of creator
templates<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Creator_templates>based
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
template<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control>.
See for example
Creator:Leonardo_da_Vinci<http://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
name<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:People_by_name>. I will
be adding " Authority control" data to creator
templates<http://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
template<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control>directly.

....

I can add “NARA” parameter to Authority_control
template<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control>and 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
to<http://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
n79056359<http://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)*