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Linking Named Entities in Diderot’s Encyclopédie to Wikidata

Diderot’s Encyclopédie is a reference work from XVIIIth century in Europe that aimed at collecting the knowledge of its era. Wikipedia has the same ambition with a much greater scope. However, the lack of digital connection between the two encyclopedias may hinder their comparison and the study of how knowledge has evolved. A key element of Wikipedia is Wikidata that backs the articles with a graph of structured data. In this paper, we describe the annotation of more than 9,100 of the Encyclopédie entries with Wikidata identifiers enabling us to connect these entries to the graph. We considered geographic and human entities. The Encyclopédie does not contain biographic entries as they mostly appear as subentries of locations. We extracted all the geographic entries and we completely annotated all the entries containing a description of human entities. This represents more than 2,600 links referring to locations or human entities. In addition, we annotated more than 8,300 entries having a geographic content only. We describe the annotation process as well as application examples. This resource is available at https://github.com/pnugues/encyclopedie_1751.