Wikipedia:Authority control

This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

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Authority control is a method used to assign a unique identifier to each topic, which, like Wikipedia's own disambiguation process and redirects, is critical for subjects that either have the same name but refer to different topics, like differentiating between John Smith (professor) and John Smith (English poet), or have different names but refer to the same topic, like Mark Twain and Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

The {{Authority control}} template links Wikipedia articles (and user pages) to the corresponding entries in library catalogs of national libraries and other authority files all over the world. The entries typically correspond to people, book titles, and similar well-defined entities and are stored in Wikidata.

As of March 2024^[update], the English Wikipedia approximately 2,110,000 articles tagged with {{Authority control}}.