As you may know, I’m was appointed Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID in June this year.

I’ve previously written a guide to using ORCID identifiers in Wikipedia.

A new tool, ‘Resolver‘, by my friend Magnus Manske, who has awesome coding skills, and is generous with them, allows you to find whether a particular ORCID identifier is used in Wikidata (and thus in one or more Wikipedia projects, in any language).

By entering the property “P496” (the Wikidata property for an ORCID ID) and the ORCID ID value (the short form, e.g. “0000-0003-4402-5296”, not the full identifier, “http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4402-5296”) into Resolver, the relevant Wikidata page, if any, is retuned. At the foot of that page are links to Wikipedia articles (again, if any).

An ORCID identifier query in Resolver

Alternatively, you may compile a URL in the format https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/resolver.php?prop=P496&value=0000-0003-4402-5296 – which will automagically redirect.

Note that this works for articles, but not identifiers used on Wikipedia editors’ user pages, which have no Wikidata equivalent.

Resolver works with other unique identifiers, too, such as VIAF, or BBC Your Paintings artist identifiers, and many more. If you want to know why that’s important, see Andrew Gray’s post, “Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?“. Resolver is not just for people, though. It will also resolve unique identifiers for other types of subjects, such as BBC programme IDs or ChemSpider IDs for chemical compounds.