30 December 2007

As I mentioned a couple of months ago I’ve been adding Wikipedia content into the Encyclopedia pages. I’ve now looked through the 2,797 Encyclopedia pages and 535 now feature Wikipedia content.

If you notice anything on these pages that looks obviously broken, do let me know. Some things may be unavoidable, because the text and HTML can change at any time without me knowing, but hopefully it should mostly work.

Also, if you come across a Wikipedia page that should be included on a corresponding Pepys Encyclopedia page, do let me know. Here’s a rough guide to the rules of thumb I developed:

• Places, particularly London streets and towns outside London, don’t feature Wikipedia content, even if it exists — the Wikipedia content usually focuses on modern-day information which doesn’t seem very relevant. Similarly with most food and drink.

• I’ve checked almost all the people in the Encyclopedia, although I soon realised that there was little point checking any women, as they so rarely feature in Wikipedia from that time period. Titled men are nearly always included of course!

• I didn’t check ships and taverns. Very few, if any, of these seemed to feature in Wikipedia, so I ended up not bothering. Let me know if you find any famous enough to have their own Wikipedia page.

So there we go — hopefully that will help us make sense of who people are over the next few years.