Help:Contributing/import

Instead of hand-creating an item per author or source, use the external-authority pages in the semantic tools sidebar.

They fetch metadata from public services (Wikidata, dblp, OpenAlex, Crossref, Open Library, ORCID) and let you pick the right record. They create a local stub item with the authority identifiers (ORCID, VIAF, ISNI, DOI, ISBN, …) and citation metadata (given/family name, published in, publisher, pages, volume, issue) — every imported statement carries an imported from <authority> reference.

Page	Creates	Input
Special:AddPerson	a person item	ORCID iD, Wikidata Q, or a name
Special:AddSource	a work item (book, scholarly article, website, song, film, video)	DOI, ISBN-13, a title, or an author
Special:AddCollective	a non-person agent item (organization, company, band, collective, institution)	a name

Workflow: search → review the candidates (same-name disambiguation) → confirm the class (pre-inferred from the authority) → create. Each candidate carries a see record details link to its canonical authority page (opens in a new tab). Repeating a lookup for an already-imported label reuses the existing item (create-or-skip). The English label comes from the authority; add fr/eo labels afterwards. Fetch failures degrade to manual item creation at Special:NewItem.

Notes:

• The authority lookups run only when you click search — never on page load.
• Author search on Special:AddSource narrows the results for common titles. Toggle between free text (an author name, e.g. Albert Einstein) and semantic entities (Wikidata Q-ids, comma-separated — e.g. Q937, Q42). The semantic mode resolves works by the author entities on the Wikidata hub.
• The provenance form on Special:AddQuotation (and the other content pages) has entity search + autofill for attributed to and source: type a name, pick the entity, the item id is filled in. Manually typed ids still work.
• Citations use the source item's harvested metadata (journal name, publisher, volume/issue/pages, DOI, ISBN) and cite the source type correctly (a book quote cites as a book, a song quote as a song).

See also

• Help:Contributing — the hub
• Help:Contributing/entities — creating and editing items and properties