Wikidata:Property proposal/West Bengal Public Library Network author ID

WBPLN author ID

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Authority control

Done: WBPLN author ID (P4343) (Talk and documentation)

Description	identifier for authors listed in the West Bengal Public Library Network
Represents	West Bengal Public Library Network (Q40567016)
Data type	External identifier
Domain	authority control
Allowed values	name of the author in the form of text
Example	Satyendranath Tagore (Q7426958) → Tagore%2C+Satyendranath
Source	http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/browse?type=author
Formatter URL	http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/browse?type=author&order=ASC&rpp=20&value=$1

Motivation

This can be an external identifier for different Indian and non-Indian authors, especially the Bengali language authors. It will be helpful for Bengali and English Wikisource projects. Bodhisattwa (talk) 16:37, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(copied from description) - identifier in the West Bengal Public Library Network, a central digital repository of books in the Indian state of West Bengal. The books are mostly in Bengali and English, published in India and abroad, scanned and uploaded by libraries from West Bengal. This repository is initiated with the assistance of Mass Education Extension and Library Services Department, Government of West Bengal and Center for Development of Advanced Computing, under the Ministry of Information & Technology , Government of India. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:51, 5 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

How will you reconcile the above-said author id with http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/handle/10689/183/browse?type=author&order=ASC&rpp=20&value=Thakur%2C+Satyendranath ? In that site, there is no standard system for spelling author names; so an author name can be spelled in multiple ways, each spelling listing different books. If the author edited some books, then the term ed. will be added to author name, thereby making a different spelling. For example, 1, 2, 3, 4, these four different IDs, as per your formula, denote the same author, but the books are different. Therefore, please suggest a standard way of formatting the id here for that site, instead of the sample given above. Hrishikes (talk) 17:32, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

IMHO, there is no other possible standard formatter url for this website. Of course, any spelling changes will create different urls, but that doesn't change the formatter url. Also, if there are multiple identifiers for the same author, we can use multiple values for the same identifier property, but not all authors have multiple identifiers here. Bodhisattwa (talk) 18:02, 21 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In that site, multiple spellings of author names is the norm rather than exception. It occurs when (1) the author has multiple books (first & middle names combined and separate; surnames in Bengali-style and Western style, like Thakur vs. Tagore, Chattopadhyay vs. Chatterjee etc.); (2) When the author has edited some books (author name + ed = new name); (3) When a book has multiple authors (name 1 + name 2 + name 3 ... = new name); (4) Plain spelling mistakes, which is also frequent. So most major authors would have multiple identifiers. I have never seen the display of multiple values for a given identifier in authority control (e.g. multiple values for VIAF or LCCN being displayed). This will be regularly required in this case. How do you propose to accomplish it? And will not such a display of variant author name spellings make the authority control look quite ugly? Hrishikes (talk) 01:12, 22 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Hrishikes:da, multiple values for a given identifier is not at all uncommon in Wikidata. You can find multiple values for Open Library ID (P648), see Truby King (Q7847131) for example. It is beyond our reach to fix the multiple IDs for same author in WBPLN or Open Library or any other site, its the job of the website maintainers. IMHO, it is not about looking ugly or pretty, its about data linkage only. If it is required, then it has to be done. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 06:57, 22 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Bodhisattwa: But where is the display? The Open Library identifier is not at all displayed in the destination site (Wikipedia). As I said, I have never seen such a double display. Have you seen it? Moreover, reader comfort is essential. That's why so much time and energy is being spent for mobile phone display. If the display looks ugly, it won't lend itself to reader comfort. However, the display can be formatted like this: if the author has, say, 3 IDs, it may show up as WBPLN: 1, 2, 3; the numbers hyperlinked to specific urls. Hrishikes (talk) 07:43, 22 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Support by analogy with all other identifiers of this type. While I share Hrishikes's concerns about redundancy of identifiers, I believe that we should encourage WBPLN to fix these redundancies when we find them to occur. Mahir256 (talk) 03:12, 24 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Support ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2 (talk) 11:32, 5 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Bodhisattwa, Hrishikes, Mahir256, ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2: Done Note that wikidata's formatter URL automatically URL-encodes the '$1' bit, so the "%2C+" in the example is really just ", ". ArthurPSmith (talk) 20:12, 11 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]