The Biographical Dictionary advertises itself as “a Wikipedia type system”. While this database was new to me, according to the site it has been online since 1997, and in an earlier review in Electronic Services Review, it is dated even further back to 1992 (Nesbeitt, 1998). Whether begun in 1997 or 1992, in online terms, the Biographical Dictionary has been in existence for a very long time: by comparison, Wikipedia was started in 2004. The Biographical Dictionary (BD) provides practically no information about itself. So this review is based mostly on my own observations. I will also compare the site to other references sources like Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster’s Biographical Dictionary and World Book Online, gauging the quality of the site’s content, ease of use and overall effectiveness.
There is no concrete information regarding the scope of the site’s contents. Junion-Metz (1998, p. 125) estimated the number of entries in the Biographical Dictionary at “more than 25,000”. I don’t know where she got this number, but I contacted the Biographical Dictionary website to find out if this estimate had changed at all since 1998. I never heard back.
The majority of the entries provide birth dates, death dates and an image of the subject along with a timeline. Only 1 of the roughly 10 to 15 entries that I examined provided any kind of overview of the subject’s life, making it difficult to quickly understand why the person was significant. There was also very limited metadata provided for most entries. These data consisted of linked subject terms of “nationality” and “categories”, However, these “categories” were not always provided, were limited to one or two labels and were not always consistent.
To measure the site’s quality and accuracy, I looked at entries for some literary figures. First I looked up the poet Dante Alighieri, who is best known for his poem, The Divine Comedy. While none of the information that the BD provided appeared to be incorrect, they failed to mention The Divine Comedy at all. By comparison, Wikipedia (2014), World Book (Lansing, 2014) and Merriam-Webster’s Biographical Dictionary (1995) all mentioned The Divine Comedy in the second sentence of their respective entries on Dante. Looking at a more modern writer, I searched for the poet Robert Lowell. The BD entry on him was very poor. They noted his date of birth and death and listed four haphazard phrases about Lowell (2006). The writing of the entry was generally sloppy and incomplete. There was also no metadata provided for Lowell.
In addition to content issues, there are serious issues with the authority of the site. Like Wikipedia, the site’s content is user-generated. However, unlike Wikipedia, there are no rules for editing, there is no way to track postings and there are no citations. As the entries are online and maintained by volunteer-editors, like Wikipedia, one might expect that updates would be frequent, but they are not. I searched for the movie director/actor Woody Allen. The last time that his entry was updated was in 2006. Since 2006, according to allmovie.com, Allen has released seven movies. One of those movies, Midnight in Paris, was Allen’s “biggest box office hit ever” (Ankeny, 2014). These facts deserve mentioning, and for an open wiki that provides biographical sketches online, users should be able to expect up-to-date information.
I wondered whether this issue might be related to ease of access for potential volunteer editors. To find out how the editing of the site works, I attempted to register as a volunteer editor but was unable to do so. When I attempted to sign up, I received an error message. I e-mailed the site to tell them about the problem but never heard back. So it is unclear to me whether or not the site is having technical problems, but if this is an ongoing problem, it could explain the lack of timeliness.
In terms of user navigation and layout, I found the site functional but less easy to navigate than a site like Wikipedia (which provides suggestions for your search as you are typing). For my Dante search, I simply entered Dante in the search field, and even though Dante is frequently noted just by his first name (as he is in Merriam-Webster’s), in the BD, with just his first name entered, Dante Alighieri was the ninth hit. Users can browse by nationality, first letter of the subject’s last name or by category, but as their metadata isn’t always entered, these browsing features are not as useful as they might otherwise be. Also, when I selected the letter D for browsing, I was given a couple of names that started with C. That’s a relatively minor error, but I think it shows the site’s lack of attention to detail.
The site has an advanced search feature that isn’t very advanced. Instead of simply searching by name, you have the option of adding a “category”. But because this metadata is inconsistent and limited, it isn’t helpful. For instance, entering the name Dante and the category writer does not turn up any entries for Dante Alighieri. You also have the option of entering the subject’s birth/death dates in the advanced search.
Researching this site, I was surprised to learn that, in the late 1990s, some reviewers recommended it. Nesbeitt recommended it for ready reference, and Junion-Metz highlighted BD as a useful tool for children, specifically recommending “the [site’s] ‘Master Biographer Challenge’, an interactive biography game for high school students”. It asks biographical trivia questions which tend to be very difficult, and when a user gets the answer wrong, no correct answer is provided. So its educational value is questionable.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend this resource to librarians or to library users of any age group; the quality is too low, and there are other superior sources of biographical information, both in print and online. Although it’s free, that’s not a good enough reason to direct users to it. If I were to hand out grades to reference websites, I would give the Biographical Dictionary a D−.
