Wikimedia versus Traditional Biographical Dictionaries?

The conference Wikimedia versus Traditional Biographical Dictionaries?, organised by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in collaboration with Wikimedia Czech Republic, will take place from 31 March to 1 April 2025 in Prague.

Call for Papers

Wikipedia has become the primary source of biographical information due to its extensive coverage. Traditional academic biographical dictionaries mostly serve to cross-verify or find entries not yet covered by Wikipedia. However, a mutual dependence between Wikipedia and traditional biographical dictionaries is still evident, as Wikipedia and even more so Wikidata rely on authority data generated by traditional producers of dictionaries. The aim of the conference is to discuss how the creation of traditional dictionaries and Wikipedia/Wikidata could complement each other.

Contributions on the following topics are particularly welcome:

1. Procedures and challenges.
Creating academic biographical dictionaries in the age of Wikipedia.

2. Digitization, open knowledge.
Searching for the meaning of academic dictionaries in the digital era.

3. Competition or cooperation?
The relationship between academic dictionaries and Wikipedia/Wikidat.

Paper proposals should be sent by 31 December 2024 to baranek@hiu.cas.cz.