· v1.6.0
Cities on the map in their own years, and the atlas reads the articles: how each ruler left office, how each rising ended, how each state fell
- Map
- Rulers and reigns
- Cities and places
- Names and languages
Wikidata knows how 29 of the 3,102 rulers who left office alive left it. Their own Wikipedia articles say, in prose, and the atlas now reads that prose by one rule: a sentence counts only when its grammar makes the page's subject its subject — “Peter III was deposed” counts, “Childeric II was killed” on his successor's page does not. The same reader gives every war, battle, rising and coup its outcome and every fallen state its ending, each with the sentence it was read from. More events have a host state, and Wikidata's own end-of-term cause is read where it exists.
- Cities on the map, drawn only while they stood and under the name they bore in the year on screen: Constantinople in 500, Istanbul in 1950, no Rome in 1500 BCE. 1,597 cities with population estimates from 2250 BCE to 1975 CE (Chandler's and Modelski's tables as digitised by Reba, Reitsma & Seto, 2016), each dot sized by the estimate for the year, with a card giving when it stood, what it was called in each period, and how many lived there at each of its years. A new “Cities” chip; it travels in the link.
- Every entry is named as its Wikipedia article is. Wikidata's label and the article's title disagreed for some 2,900 entries — “Long War” for the Long Turkish War, “Coalition Wars” for the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, “Ifat Sultanate” for the Sultanate of Ifat — and the article's name now stands on the timeline, the map, the search and the panel alike. The atlas's own Ukrainian names still come first, and a bare word the fuller name qualifies keeps it: the People's Republic of China is not “China”, because every “China” in every article would then be the state of 1949.
- The map's name for a state is the atlas entry's, which is its Wikipedia article's, wherever the border polygon is that entry alive in those years — “Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia” where the borders dataset wrote “Halych-Volhynia occupation” — and the card still says what the dataset called it.
- Every reign on a succession line now says how it ended as the ruler's own article tells it — deposed, abdicated, resigned, killed, executed, exiled, lost an election, served out the term — with the sentence printed under the reign and “read from the ruler's own article” as its source. It decides a reign only where a historian's coding, Wikidata's end cause and Wikidata's manner of death all say nothing, which is most rulers who left office alive.
- Two more grounds for an irregular handover: the ruler's own article says they were deposed, exiled, killed or executed, and the successor's own article says they seized power. The Russian Empire's palace revolutions and a Mughal emperor's deposition now count where the record alone could not see them.
- What a war, battle, rising or coup came to, as its own article says — put down by whom, a victory for whom, settled by which treaty, succeeded, not over — in the reading at the top of the investigation and on the hover card, for 481 events; and how a state fell — conquered by whom, partitioned, dissolved, replaced by what — for 235 states. Each with its sentence; nothing is said where the article's words could not be tied to the subject.
- Wikidata's own end-of-term cause (resignation, abdication, deposition, a coup, a named event such as the Glorious Revolution) is read for the 214 terms that carry it, above the manner of death: a term that ended by abdication did not end by the death years later.
- 888 more events have a host state: the border test now reads the point of the city, region or battlefield an event names, not only an event's own coordinate. Fewer risings, regime changes and massacres stand without a state for the theories to read.
- Download of the reign table carries the new columns: Wikidata's end cause, the article's word and its sentence, and the successor's seizure.