The blog makes some good points in great partisan style.

Every source has it's limitations. Take a look at the google map on the front page of http://viaf.org/ There are entire continents with no active participants in traditional library authority control, hell, there's a continent not even on the map! (WikiProject Antarctica has 15,798 articles) And those countries with active participants in traditional library authority control largely have certain features in common (Western, predominately English speaking, etc).

We need to understand limitations. Both of ourselves and others.

[I'd also like to note the excellent authority work happening in .eg, that's very useful, precisely because no one else is doing it.]

cheers
stuart

From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Murray, Ronald <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, 28 August 2015 12:42 a.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] BIBFRAME Identifier, Role, and Authority Proposals

Individual and institutional parties planning on citing any Wikipedia content for any short- or long-term purpose should first alert themselves to the resource’s potentially problematic governance and social (w.r.t. editor behaviors) issues. This website documents and comments upon a number of those:

http://wikipediocracy.com

Ron Murray

From: Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Bibliographic Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 at 10:22 PM
To: Bibliographic Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] BIBFRAME Identifier, Role, and Authority Proposals

Agreed, for contemporary persons. But the number of VIAF-related WP articles is relatively small, as I recall - a few tens of thousands? Where we can link them up, though, WP Infoboxes/WikiData can provide a lot of usable information. But it's a drop in the bucket since most people and organizations in the library authority files are not going to meet Wikipedia's guidelines for notability (as you know from AfD*).

kc
* "Articles for Deletion" where wikipedians argue about whether an article meets the criteria of the requirements for inclusion. Those criteria are not met by most authors or academics.

On 8/26/15 6:56 PM, Stuart Yeates wrote:

For those VIAF records which are linked to Wikipedia articles, VIAF reliably includes dates of death.

In my experience, one of the most reliably-added pieces of information in Wikipedia biographies is death dates.

cheers

stuart

--
I have a new phone number: 04 463 5692
https://www.facebook.com/VUWLibrary / https://www.facebook.com/TKMPC
From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, 27 August 2015 1:26 p.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] BIBFRAME Identifier, Role, and Authority Proposals
On 8/26/15 3:17 PM, Thomas Berger wrote:
LC records may be lacking explicit (especially death) dates, but
they usually contain a wealth of textual references which more often
than not reveal exact birth dates and other important contextual
information (affiliations, notable works, places of birth, death
and activity).
You say "usually," but I see "occasionally." As an example, here's the LC authority record for me: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n89613425.marcxml.xml, and if you can find "other important contextual information" you are a better reader than I am. Plus, when that information is available it's in a note field and can be quite cryptic:

"found: Phone call to Curbstone Press, 07-13-94 (Michael H. Cooper is a pseudonym of Michael Clark; b. 6-11-51; res. in Alaska)"
"found: Message from J. Baker, 11/08/88 (Michael D. Cooper; b. 10/30/41) "

Thomas, I think you are being overly optimistic about the state of authority data today. I agree that it can get better, but I don't agree that VIAF extracts much "data" -- it basically gets what you can get from a MARC name heading field, and adds in titles of works (which it gets from the WorldCat database). There may be more information in non-US authority files, but rather than relying on impressions it would be better to have a good study of available data.

kc
-- 
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
m: +1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600

-- 
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
m: +1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600