· v1.8.0
Peoples on the move, the ancient world's places, and a record that agrees with itself
- Map
- Investigate
- Cities and places
- Data and accuracy
The map now draws the movements of peoples while they were under way and, when asked, the towns, forts and shrines of the ancient world in the periods each is attested in. Underneath, a week of repairs: the reader of article sentences stopped mistaking words for causes, a few rows filed as the wrong kind of thing were put right, and every number the atlas's own documents print is now checked against the data it comes from.
- Migrations on the map: each movement drawn only in its own years, as a line with arrows from where it began to where it arrived, a ring at its start and the people's name, the dash saying how well it is attested. In 400 the Huns are crossing from the steppe towards the Hungarian plain and the Visigoths from the Danube towards Toulouse. Nothing slides along the line with the year: two endpoints do not say where a people was in between.
- Ancient places: the settlements, forts and shrines the Pleiades gazetteer locates and dates, nearly sixteen thousand of them, each drawn in the periods it is attested in. Off by default, because it is dense; switch it on beside the cities.
- The map's layer switches wrap between switches rather than inside their names, and one that is off can be read over the map.
- Investigate reads an article's sentences more carefully: “fled to” and “failed to” are no longer read as “led to”, nor “Following their” as “following the”, and a sentence that names its subject by a word of its name now counts as that subject's. About sixty causes that were never in the text went, and the pandemic pages now name the virus that caused them.
- A bacterium is not dated by the year it was identified: Yersinia pestis is no longer drawn as a discovery of 1894 that caused plagues centuries earlier; the plagues keep it as their cause, undated. Laki in 1783 is an eruption rather than a discovery.
- An earthquake, a wave or an eruption the atlas already draws is no longer drawn a second time from the NOAA catalogue — Tambora's wave of 1815, the shock under Thera, Vesuvius in 1631.
- Background data reads four records over all the years they hold, not the narrower years once typed for them, and Denmark and the medieval Kingdom of Norway now read the people Wikidata files under their other names.
- Where the atlas prints a Ukrainian form of a name, the panel now says whether the other name beside it is Wikidata's label or the English article's title.