[Web4lib] Authority files and Wikipedia

[Jeremy Dunck]

On 8/13/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> 
> Last weekend the Wikimania conference was held in Frankfurt,
> Germany, not at the Sheraton or Marriott but at a youth hostel.
> This was the first international conference devoted entirely to
> the development of Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia) and related
> projects.

Thanks for the report; I very much wish I could have gone.  I don't
suppose you are among the wikipedia researchers?  If so, I'd like to
hear how that BoF went.


> This cooperation was also featured in a press release from DDB on
> August 2, "Wikipedia nutzt Katalog Der Deutschen Bibliothek und
> deutsche Normdateien".  I fail to find a bookmarkable URL for this
> press release, but you can find it under "News" at www.ddb.de.

I believe this will do:
http://www.ddb.de/news/pressemitt_wikipedia.htm
or, a rough approximation of English:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ddb.de%2Fnews%2Fpressemitt_wikipedia.htm&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
(same, but tiny:) http://tinyurl.com/cnpk2


> There is nothing magic in this of course, except that the
> volunteers of the German Wikipedia have gone through all 270,000
> articles and found 38,508 biographies, and matched no fewer than
> 14,013 of them to the DDB authority file and inserted the PND
> numbers in these Wikipedia articles.

I'm sure some on the list will be quick to point out that some of the
matches were missed or miscorrellated.  Nonetheless, sounds quite
useful.

> The German branch is the 2nd biggest in Wikipedia, surpassed only
> by the 680,000 articles of the English language Wikipedia.

I've always wondered why that is-- if it is a cultural, technological,
or random thing.