CRIMSON HEXAGONAL ARCHIVE · ORTHONYM WING · AXN:01F8.GOVERNANCE.🏗️🤲🧭🖊️👁️□ · deposit #645

How authorship is made and named: a meta-aggregator / Wikidata

Wikidata

https://www.wikidata.org/

infrastructureAttribution, credit and identity infrastructureHeteronymy, persona and pseudonymous authorshipMeta-aggregationactive
The archive's reading. Wikidata holds a chosen name as data about its bearer: the pseudonym property P742 lists 'heteronym' among its aliases with pen name and stage name and stores the name as a string on the item of the person who used it, so in #940's terms the data model keeps the label and records it as a pseudonym of one function. The saved sources do not show whether a heteronym is given an item of its own or how such an item would stand to its civil bearer.
Relation to this censusinfrastructure
Record typedatabase
The question it answersWhat sourced statements does a structured knowledge base hold about a person or work, including the names a person used (property P742, pseudonym) and identifiers in other authority files?
Kinda free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary knowledge base, collecting structured data (its own words); a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph (Wikipedia, third party)
Operatorhosted and owned by the Wikimedia Foundation and developed mainly by Wikimedia Deutschland (Wikipedia, third party); its data is entered and maintained by Wikidata editors, who decide the rules of content creation and management, and by automated bots (its own introduction)
Evidenceidentity registry; wiki
Unit of recordan item (a Q-number) with a label, a description, optional aliases, statements (property-value pairs with qualifiers, references and rank) and sitelinks; a name a person used is a statement on that person's item, with property P742 (pseudonym) and a string value
What it recordsitems for any topic, concept or object: more than 123 million data entities as of October 2026; items for scholarly articles are the largest part, followed by biographies (Wikipedia); statements with their sources and connections to other databases
Whose authorship it keepsnot a holder of works: it holds statements about items, among them works and persons; a statement can pair a property such as 'author' with a person as value
Under what nameas data on the bearer's item: an item has a label (labels need not be unique; the label with its description must be), a description and any number of aliases; the pseudonym property P742 ('alias used by someone') stores a pen name, stage name or, by its own alias list, a 'heteronym' as a string of up to 100 characters on the item of the human, character, group of humans or other allowed subject who used it, with optional qualifiers such as 'applies to work', start time and end time; whether a heteronym is given an item of its own, and how that item links to its bearer, is not shown in the saved sources
Who holds itthe Wikimedia Foundation as host and owner; structured data in the main, Property, Lexeme and EntitySchema namespaces under CC0, reusable without permission; editors decide the rules of content
Authorial function and responsibilitynot recorded as authorial function: an 'author' statement links a work to an item, and P742 records that a name was used by the item's subject; the saved sources give no place for a voice, corpus or responsibility distinct from that subject
Methodcommunity editing and bot imports ('a large proportion of the data on Wikidata consists of entries imported en masse from other databases by Internet bots', Wikipedia), with references recorded on statements, ranks, and property constraints treated as alerts
Coveragegeography: multilingual and global; period: launched 29 October 2012
Countvalue: more than 123 million data entities (October 2026); about 116 million items (2025); 1.65 billion item statements (early 2025, marked 'verification needed'); as_of: October 2026 (Wikipedia, third party)
Holdingsmore than 123 million data entities, such as items, properties and lexemes (October 2026); items for scholarly articles (the largest part) and biographies; more than 1.7 million lexemes in 1,568 languages (October 2026); identifier properties linking items to external authority files, among them ISNI (P213) and VIAF file numbers; property P742 (pseudonym), with 'heteronym' among its aliases
Stated limitsconstraints 'are treated as testing alerts and hints, rather than inviolable rules' (Wikipedia, third party); on P742, the citation-needed constraint has the status of a 'suggestion constraint'; the notability policy decides what kind of data belongs (named in the introduction, not saved)
Data accesspublic wiki; the Wikidata Query Service (SPARQL); APIs including a REST API (stable from 11 November 2024); Lua access for client wikis; a vector-based search tool supporting the Model Context Protocol (the Wikidata Embedding Project, October 2025, per Wikipedia)
Licence'All structured data from the main, Property, Lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License ; text in the other namespaces is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License'
Lifecyclestate: active; detail: the introduction was last edited 21 October 2026; Wikipedia (last edited 25 October 2026) reports QLever chosen in June 2026 to replace Blazegraph for the Query Service by 30 June 2027
Version and timelaunched: 2012-10-29; entities_count: 2026-10; intro_last_edited: 2026-10-21; p742_last_edited: 2026-08-24; wikipedia_last_edited: 2026-10-25; read: 2026-11-01
Founded2012 (launched 29 October 2012)

What its record can settle

What it cannot settle

Kept apart

Relations

Evidence

Unchecked

Wikidata's notability policy, help pages on items, labels and aliases, and its copyright page (named and unsaved); the items that use P742 (no count or sample beyond the property page's examples); how Wikidata models a heteronym with an item of its own, linked to its bearer (not shown in the saved sources); P1449 (nickname) and the related name properties listed on the P742 page

Cite: Lee Sharks, ed. "Wikidata." How authorship is made and named: a meta-aggregator, leesharks.com, compiled 2026-11-01. https://www.leesharks.com/apparatus/aggregators/wikidata

LEE SHARKS · APPARATUS · META-AGGREGATOR · META-AGGREGATORS OF THE CRIMSON HEXAGON · COMPILED 2026-11-01 · CC BY 4.0

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