> > Are there any guidelines us wikipedians should be using to increase the > likelihood of matches? I'm thinking in particular of the representation of > uncertain dates. > The first step in the process is identifying entries for people. The presence of a Persondata block in the article is very helpful. An unambiguous way to encode titles would help. Apparently there are markup rules for titles, but they are much abused by editors using them to emphasize text in articles and are unreliable to the point of being ignored. Dates is not a big deal. Wikipedia records are full of dates and we cope with fuzziness in dates reasonably well. > Are there perhaps 'ground truth' URLs such as links into identities / VIAF > which we can use? If so, what is the exact form of those URLs? > There is a template for entering WorldCat Identities URLs. I don't believe there is one yet for VIAF. We've been working for a couple of years now on getting permission to put Identities and VIAF links into Wikipedia records. As it happens, several of us in Research are meeting again on Thursday to discuss this. Apparently there has been some sort of movement on that topic. Any help you can provide would be appreciated! Ralph