Presenter
Adrian Pohl (@acka47)
Tobias Bülte (@tobiasNx)
Abstract
This talk presents a case study on interlinking Wikipedia and online bibliographies, focusing on the North Rhine-Westphalian Bibliography (NWBib), one of Germany’s largest regional bibliographies with approximately 500,000 entries.
From 2017 to 2020, we transitioned spatial subject indexing in NWBib from uncontrolled strings to controlled values based on Wikidata as detailed in [this Code4Lib article](https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15875). Building on this foundation, in 2026, we successfully added around 4,300 links from the German Wikipedia to NWBib.
The talk outlines the migration to Wikidata-based spatial subject indexing and then focuses on our efforts to get those links into Wikipedia: how we approached it, created a [Wikipedia template](Vorlage:NWBib.de – Wikipedia) and [bot](Benutzer:NWBibBot – Wikipedia) that got banned and unbanned and what we learned along the way. Finally, we will share how those links have affected NWBib visitor numbers.