This talk delivered at Berkeley iSchool Friday Seminars describes the current state and future of connecting Data Islands such as VIAF and WorldCat with Wikipedia. Although there is a lot of talk about how the web ought to be linked, VIAFbot serves as a prototype for how bidirectional linking can be imitated by "link reciprocation method," a creation of the author Max Klein.

1. Merrilee Proffitt and
Max Klein
OCLC Research
August 24 2012

2.  45 years old
 Almost 30K libraries contributing from
170 countries
 More than 271 M items
 1200 employees
 21 offices worldwide

3.  Since 1978
 46 people
 3 locations (Dublin, San Mateo, Leiden)
 Pure research
 not product R&D
 not market research

9.  Wikipedians still complain about the vector
skin

11.  Although content creation is fast
 Internal policy progress is glacial, conservative
 Consensus model over asynchronous and near-
anonymous discussion

12.  “The free bureaucracy, that anyone can
legislate.” ~ San Francisco Wiknic 2012

14.  Community orginated.
 27,456 instances
 2009 “Linkspam” accusations against OCLC.
 Cause links to Amazon and B&N on the WorldCat
page.
 Original accuser was banned for being
argumentative.

15.  Crux: Should Wikipedia promote any
organization?
 Open question in the community

16.  Disambiguation
 Collation

17.  Authority file
matching
 During creation used
Wikipedia data
 2013. Wikipedia will
be promoted to
“source” rather than
reference.

18.  English Wikipedia
 4,000 instances
 German Wikipeida
 220,000 instances
 Wikimedia Commons
 45,000 instances
…
 Added by hand
 Rules vary by
language

19. …
Load VIAF Data Check Deutsche Wikipedia Edit English Wikipedia

20.  English Only, for now
 Targets 260,000 pages
 1/16th of English Wikipedia
 Still won’t be fully synched with Deutsche
Wikipedia

21.  https://github.com/notconfusing/VIAFbot
 Uses Pywikipediabot
 In community code review: running within the
next month

22.  Transclusion & Sugarcoated HTML

23.  Transclusion
 You can draw in text from other pages (typically
templates)
 Can send parameters
 Templates can perform
 Simple logic operations
 Simple text manipulation
 Still Wikitext, not fully query-able

24. “The way you always thought Wikipedia worked.”
~Merrilee Proffitt

25.  Phase 1
 Revamping interlanguage links
 Phase 2
 Data, Templates and Infoboxes
 Phase 3
 Semantic querying

26.  Now: Added by  Soon: Wikidata
hand or bot concept page

27.  Soon: Properties for a concept

28.  Soon: This won’t be a monumental effort.

29.  The end of the assumption that Wikipages
store Wikitext.
 On Wikidata they store JSON.

30.  All the work VIAFbot is doing, will be accessible
across 270 Wikis.
 Plus language specific lookup…

31.  RDF Data

32.  Backers: Google, Paul Allen Institute for
Artificial Intelligence, Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation.
 Release Date: January 2013
 Caveat: Requires adoption by each individual
language wiki – by consensus.
 Wikipedias having found consensus so far: …

33.  Hungarian Wikipedia

34.  Bibliographic data is both:
 An element of citation
 An articles in its own right

35. • 411,274 citations of books
• 244, 236 citations of journals
• 57,868 citations of encyclopedias
• 342,470 of newspapers
• 1,055,845 total print citations
• 1,169,495 citations of web
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Maximilianklein/Citations

36. • 154,978 Citation of Google books
• 38,328 Citations of Amazon
• 7,695 Citations of Worldcat
http://webempires.org/wikirank-wikipedias-top-sources/wiki_top/
• Must Make it easier to link to libraries.

38.  Wikipedia features bidirectional linking.
 Take links forward all the time, why not backwards?

39.  Could add “what cites this”
What cites this

40.  A Wikipedia article could be a good way of
declaring the aboutness of a record.
~Asaf Bartov (User:Ijon)

41. links to

42.  Could add “what’s about this”
What’s about this

43. What’s
about this

44.  Dream
 Take your browser history

47.  Would still have to create bidirectional links
between WorldCat and Wikipeida

48.  There is the practical solution.
 VIAFbot is the prototype of the link
reciprocation solution

49.  Have to gain Wikipedia approval to reciprocate
links with a bot
 Subject to community approval
 Requires maintenance
 Can become unsynchronized

50.  Seaplanes
 Imitated bidirectional
 Islands
 Wikipedia, VIAF, WorldCat
 Data Archipelago

51. Max Klein and Merrilee Proffitt
@notconfusing and@merrileeiam