On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Tod Matola <todmatola_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> There is a problem, the wikipedia policy prevent organizations for adding
> large volumes of links to services, I think to prevent commercial entities
> from polluting the data with bogus links or advertisements for their
> products. OCLC is no exception, we have tried for years.
While this is historically accurate, it is shifting sand. The
Wikimedia Foundation is now actively working with the cultural
heritage sector [1] to help enrich Wikipedia with resources from the
library community. You might want to try to re-engage with this group
if you are interested in helping enrich Wikipedia with library data.
It's interesting to see that the Wikipedia community themselves (us?)
have created a template [2] that encourages Wikipedia editors to link
articles to authority controlled records on the Web (VIAF, etc). For
example, take a look at the article for Alexander Graham Bell [3].
Scroll to the bottom and do you see the "Authority Control" box with
links to VIAF, LCCN, and the Deutschen Nationalbibliothek? This is
achieved with a template [2] where the editor just has to look up the
appropriate IDs and put them into the article:
{{Authority control|PND=119408643|LCCN=n/79/113947|VIAF=59263727}}
If you are curious I've hacked on a little proof of concept app that
highlights links from Wikipedia to library websites like VIAF, so you
can see a list of links to VIAF [4], and subscribe to a feed for
updates if you are unnaturally curious like me :-)
I think OCLC should be commended for:
1) making persistent URLs for authority records, so that they *can* be
linked to from places like Wikipedia
2) creating and managing links out to Wikipedia from places like VIAF
I think we could all learn a lot from this, and think that Karen is
right: this is a visible sign that Linked Data actually happening.
Some things we could maybe do a bit better:
1) making authority control websites (like VIAF) indexable by search
engines, so that they can be more readily discovered and linked to
(SEO 101)
2) making links to places like Wikipedia available in our
bibliographic data, so that they are shared more widely in other
library systems.
A big thanks to Jonathan and Steve for raising awareness about this
opportunity for libraries. And for folks like Jakob Voss [5] who have
been leading the charge in integrating Wikipedia with Libraries for
several years now.
//Ed
[1] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
[4] http://linkypedia.info/websites/23/pages/
[5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-JV2
Received on Fri May 20 2011 - 11:11:13 EDT