Same artist, cataloged differently at every museum

One of the quieter problems in cultural heritage data: the same artist gets cataloged differently at every museum. Getty might record a Wikidata ID. A smaller museum might just type the name. Multiply that across a couple hundred thousand records, and the same person ends up as several disconnected "people" in the data, with no clean way to tell.

LinkedCulture already reconciles these automatically when it can. If two records share a real external identifier (Wikidata, Getty ULAN), that's certain enough to merge without asking anyone. But a lot of matches are softer than that: same name, no shared ID, could easily be two different people who happen to share a name.

Those used to just sit there, unresolved. This week I built a review queue for exactly that case. It shows me both candidate profiles side by side, with sample artworks, so I can actually look before deciding whether they're the same person. Approve, and the profile page redirects immediately. Reject, and they stay separate.

Small feature, but it's the difference between "the pipeline guessed" and "a person looked."

You can see where this all lands at linkedculture.org/people: browse artists across every collection in the project, including the ones that only show up as connected because a record from one museum and a record from another turned out to be the same person.