# Linking Named Entities in Diderot's Encyclop'edie to Wikidata

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03221 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03221/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Pretrainer's Guide to Training Data: Measuring the Effects of Data Age, Domain Coverage, Quality, & Toxicity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13169/) (2023)
- [Connecting a French Dictionary from the Beginning of the 20th Century to Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11022/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [EDDA-Coordinata: An Annotated Dataset of Historical Geographic Coordinates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23941/) (2026)
- [ATLAS: Article Tracking, Linking, and Analysis of Swedish Encyclopedias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02466/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diderot's Encyclop'edie 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 10,300 of the Encyclop'edie entries with Wikidata identifiers enabling us to connect these entries to the graph. We considered geographic and human entities. The Encyclop'edie 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 9,500 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/encyclopedie1751