Wikipedia:ORCID

This page is about the use of ORCID (the Open Researcher and Contributor ID) in Wikipedia.

ORCID is a form of authority control – that's nothing to do with authoritarianism, it's a term borrowed from library cataloguing.

An ORCID identifier allows us to determine that the Jim Smith who wrote paper A is the same Jim Smith who wrote paper B, and James T. Smith who wrote paper C, but not the Jim Smith who wrote paper D. It also allows us to determine that Jim Smith-Singh is the same author, after a name change, say on marriage or divorce.

There are three ways we can use ORCID identifiers in Wikipedia:

• In articles about people
• On user pages
• In citations