If Voltaire had used Wikipedia… | Voltaire Foundation

"Sharing open knowledge about Voltaire’s histories

To raise awareness of Voltaire as a historian, we used three tools:

1. Histropedia: a free tool for creating engaging, interactive visualisations
2. Wikidata: a free database and sister site of Wikipedia that drives Histropedia and other visualisations
3. Wikipedia: the free multilingual encyclopedia.

As well as holding data about people, publications, and events, Wikidata acts as a cross-reference between the different language versions of Wikipedia, showing which concepts are represented in which languages. By querying Wikidata, we could count how many language versions of Wikipedia had an article on each work by Voltaire. This showed, as expected, a large imbalance: forty languages for Candide versus three for the Essai sur les mœurs, for example. The current number of articles for each work is shown by the size of the bubbles below."