Wikisource:Authority control

Authority control is the practice of creating and maintaining index terms for bibliographic material in a catalogue, and is particularly useful for assigning unique identifiers to people, works or subjects. When applied to Wikisource, it means maintaining links to a set of standard external catalogues.

Authority control practices at Wikisource
The authority control template is used on author, portal and book pages to collect authority control data from relevant sources. This template accesses Wikidata via the authority control module.

It should be placed at the end of the page.

List of authority controls
Below is a list of authority controls which can be used on Wikisource, along with example identifiers and links to the corresponding database entries. Different authority controls are appropriate to different namespaces.

Author authority controls
Authority control is used mostly within the author namespace and make up the bulk of the available controls.

Finding authority control IDs
Authority control identification numbers can be found on the respective website associated with the authority controls. For example, searching the Library of Congress catalog is a good way to find a correct LCCN. Some sources provide links to other authority control but many do not.

There are two main sources that can provide more than one authority control ID: Of these, VIAF, as an authority control aggregator, will provide the most IDs in one place. WorldCat will often provide, for authors, the LCCN and VIAF numbers and, for works, LCCN and OCLC numbers.
 * VIAF
 * WorldCat, for works
 * WorldCat Identities, for authors

For works sourced from the Internet Archive, some authority controls can be found on a linked website, Open Library. The link to this is the "editable web page" in the line "This book has an editable web page on Open Library" on the Internet Archive. The Open Library page will often list authority control IDs such as LCCN and OCLC as well as its own Open Library ID.

Authority controls are also used with Wikisource's sister projects, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. It is possible that some authority control IDs have been added to appropriate page on those projects. They can usually be copied to the Wikisource page without alteration.

VIAF data
Authority control links can be added on Wikisource, which will override information held on Wikidata, but the best practice is to keep all data centrally at Wikidata where it can be used by not only this project but all Wikimedia projects.

The exception is the VIAF link.

The presence of a VIAF link on Wikisource should indicate that the data has been checked and verified by a human being on this project. Uses of authority control without a VIAF link imply that the data is currently unverified as far as this project is concerned.

The following maintenance tracking categories should show the current state of VIAF links on this project.
 * Category:VIAF not on Wikisource‎ ( pages)
 * Category:VIAF not on Wikidata‎ ( pages)
 * Category:VIAF different on Wikidata‎ ( pages)

If errors are found in the in the VIAF records, they can be reported on Wikipedia, from whence they will be passed on to VIAF themselves.