User:Magnus Manske/GLAM ID matching

This page is intended as an informal FAQ for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM institutions for short), with respect to the usage of institution-specific identifiers on Wikidata.

So what is this about?

Wikidata has millions of items, each representing a human, a place, a painting, a concept, etc. Each item has statements (key-value pairs), each statement in turn consisting of a property such as "birth date", and the appropriate value for the item. Likewise, there can be statements for external IDs, such as a VIAF ID (P214).

And what does that have to do with us?

We may be using your identifiers as statements, as we do for VIAF.

But our lawyers might object to that for copyright reasons!

Individual identifiers, such as numbers, can not be under copyright. If you are an institution based in Europe, the whole of your ID list may be under database copyright, but we are not copying the entire list in bulk; rather, volunteers add most of them individually, one at a time. And with ~25 million items, Wikidata is not really building a "business model" on your IDs.

So why are you using our IDs then?

Because anyone looking at a Wikidata item, on Wikidata or elsewhere, can find further information on other web sites, including yours!

So we'll get more web traffic from you?

Yup.

That's nice, but still...

You can also use our services for your own purposes:

• BEACON can give you a list of your IDs matched against any other we have for the same items. "BBC Your Paintings" artists against VIAF? No problem! Use it to augment or cross-check your data.
• You can use our other data as well, including translated names, birth/death dates and locations, free images, you name it.
• Also, services that are based on our data, like Histropedia for timelines, or automatic descriptions. There exist several lists of such services.

Great! But we have (tens of) thousands of entries. Is someone going to search for all of them by hand?

There is a tool which holds a snapshot of your IDs and corresponding names. It provides several ways of finding Wikidata items that match your IDs, and even helps to create new Wikidata items (in the unlikely event we don't have one yet).

Hey, our catalog is already in that tool, but not on Wikidata! Why?

For each catalog, a property has to be created. The voting process is sometimes slower than the seeding of the tool. Don't worry, once the property is created, the tool will synchronize with Wikidata.

So you're doing all of this for us ... how can we help?

You can start getting involved by having a look at the official GLAM pages of the Wikimedia Foundation. In terms of practical involvement, you can help (or getting volunteers to help) with the ID matching, over hosting a hackathon, to getting a Wikipedian in Residence. Or maybe just link back to Wikidata from your pages!

Nah, I want to do the matching myself!

Try OpenRefine for Wikidata!