Finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia

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 (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).

Resolver screenshot

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.

2 thoughts on “Finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia

  1. Andy Mabbett Post author

    Update:

    You can append &project=enwiki, to give the URL https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/resolver.php?prop=P496&value=0000-0003-4402-5296&project=enwiki which will take you straight to the equivalent (English-language) Wikipedia article.

    For someone with an article in another language, like Judy Armitage in Spanish, use eswiki instead of enwiki: https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/resolver.php?prop=P496&value=0000-0003-4983-9731&project=eswiki

    and so on.

    Reply
  2. Andy Mabbett Post author

    Update #2: I asked Magnus if he could make this work for other sites that identify things using Wikidata IDs, and he quickly did so:

    https://twitter.com/MagnusManske/status/940877293475565568

    For example:

    https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/resolver.php?prop=P496&value=0000-0003-4402-5296&project=scholia

    The list of projects which can be used is determined by the list of “third party formatter URL” property (P3303) on the item about Wikidata QIDs, which I recently created.

    Reply

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