The first build
- Timeline
- Map
- Data and accuracy
- Sharing and links
A timeline and a map of five thousand years, built from Wikidata, with every article read inside the atlas.
- A synchronoptic timeline of Wikidata’s states, events, people and works from 3000 BCE, in six world regions and an “Unplaced” lane.
- Click any bar to read its Wikipedia article inside the atlas, search by name, switch to the map, and copy the URL to share the exact view.
- Entries Wikidata gives no coordinates inherit a place from where they happened or who made them: unplaced entries fell from 38% to 2.4%, and each entry says how it was placed.
- Every entry is filed by kind (battle, siege, treaty, plague, ruler, scientist and more) with its own colour and icon.
- Open one region to read its states with the people, events and works they hosted beneath them, and pin another to compare; the other regions stay visible on the same axis.
- Each person, event and work is placed under the state that hosted it, checked against the dates: Leonardo under the Republic of Florence, not Italy, which did not yet exist.
- Click to fix the year; picking something off screen takes the timeline and the map to it.
- Early states such as Ancient Egypt, Sumer and Uruk are kept with their true founding dates.
- Piracy and Instability collections, picked from the control strip.
- Fixed: BCE dates from Wikidata were a year out. Julius Caesar is now born in 100 BCE.
- Fixed: people were drawn on the map after their deaths.
- Fixed: anyone who had ever served in an army was filed as a commander; Tacitus, Cicero and Gagarin now read as a politician, a philosopher and an explorer.