I think you misunderstood that Ya'aqov.

What we do is make local authority records out of the Wikipedia records that we've identified as names.  So the adding dates and stuff is to the local authority record of that Wikipedia record.  We then use our usual VIAF matching technology between those Wikipedia authority records and the other authority records in VIAF.  Wikipedia records that end up in a VIAF cluster get kept and the others get dropped as not matching anything we have in VIAF.

I hope that helps!

Ralph

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Ya'aqov Ziso
> Sent: Sunday, May 22, 2011 5:15 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] wikipedia/author disambiguation
> 
> Thanks Karen, but you don't indicate yet, how you solve disambiguation?
> 
> You indicate how you use WP as a resource for adding dates and subjects
> when
> they are missing.
> You don't indicate when/how you are resolving ambiguities with WP data.
> 
> Again, please use Morris William as an example,
> *Ya'aqov*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > *Once a year OCLC downloads Wikipedia and then we extract as much
> > information from it as we can. This generally involves reading through
> > their current information for templates, etc. Then we try to figure
> > out which pages are people. Within the people pages we look for birth
> > dates, death dates, work titles, ISBNs, oclc numbers, worldcat
> > identity links, LCCNs ... anything that we have in VIAF for matching
> > purposes. Then we build marc-ish records for each of the extracted
> > person. After that the records go through the normal VIAF matching
> > processes.
> >
> > The process gets changed and tweaked each year.*