About the atlas and its method

The atlas is built around one question: what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time? Pick a day, a year, a decade or a century, and the globe, the map and the timeline show the events of that period by region, the links between them and the paths of the people and states involved.

Each event and participant opens as a card in the atlas, with the date, place, connections and sources. Each historical thread and century also has a plain text page in English and Russian, and there are lists of all events and all participants that lead to their cards. The interactive atlas needs JavaScript; the text pages, including this one, do not.

It is a navigation and reference tool. The atlas is a selection of events, not an exhaustive history, and it does not replace the scholarly works it cites.

The atlas is made of these kinds of records:

Events

Something that happened on a date or over a period: a title, a date or a start and an end, a place (sometimes a route), a category, a historical thread, participants, a short summary, a longer description, at least one source and, optionally, links to other events.

Participants

People, states, peoples and groups, organizations, objects and ideas, with their own dates and, where available, sources.

Places

A name and coordinates, flagged as approximate when the exact location is not known, and a modern name for orientation.

Threads and regions

A thread groups events along one historical line. Regions are the world areas that lay out the timeline; the region of an event is normally derived from its coordinates.

Before data enter the atlas, the same compiler that builds the atlas checks the files for format, dates, references and duplicates, and an import with errors is rejected. This validation shows that the data are well formed and consistent. It does not show that a cited work supports a particular statement.

Every event must list at least one source; a record without one is rejected. A source can be a Wikipedia article in English or Russian, a bibliographic reference to scholarly literature, a web address or a note. Where a record has a Wikidata identifier, its card links to the Wikidata item. The sources of an event are listed at the bottom of its card.

Two outside inputs are used directly. Articles on Wikipedia are cited as sources. Wikidata is also a structured input: a helper tool can start a draft record from a Wikidata item, converting its dates (with the precision Wikidata states), coordinates and identifiers into the atlas format, and a separate check compares the dates and coordinates of records that carry a Wikidata identifier with Wikidata and confirms that the cited Wikipedia articles exist. A difference found by that check is a reason to look at the sources again. It does not prove which side is right: both Wikipedia and Wikidata are community-edited and can be wrong.

Scholarly and primary literature is cited where the record gives it. Not every record has such a source. A listed source tells the reader where to look; it does not mean that each sentence has been checked against it page by page, or that every cited work was independently read for the statement it accompanies.

The summaries and descriptions are written anew for the atlas and link to their sources.

A date is recorded with the precision its sources allow: an exact day, a month, a year, a decade, a century, or an interval “somewhere between” two dates, optionally marked “about” or “uncertain”. An event card says in words how precise the date is (for example “exact date”, “year known” or “exact date unknown: an interval is given”), and the timeline draws an uncertain date as a whisker across the whole possible interval. Years before the common era are counted without a year 0.

By default the atlas uses the calendar most sources use for the period: the Julian calendar up to 4 October 1582 and the Gregorian from 15 October 1582, the first day of the reform. The ten days in between do not exist in this scheme, so such dates cannot be entered. A record may state an explicit calendar, Julian or Gregorian. For a Julian date after 1582, such as a Russian Old Style date, a date given to the day is shown in both styles. Internally every date becomes a Julian Day Number, so events from any calendar can be compared on one scale.

The atlas records each date as the record states it, in the calendar the record names (or the default). It does not claim that every date originally reckoned in another system, such as a lunar, regnal or cyclical calendar, has been independently converted to a Julian or Gregorian day. Where the exact days of a record are known to be unverified, its card says so, as the card for the fall of Kaifeng does. Treat a date given to the day, especially before the modern era, as the date given by the cited sources and not as a verified conversion.

A place in the atlas is a catalogue point with coordinates. A marker shows where an event is catalogued. It is not the whole area of a battle, a city or a state, and it is not a political border. When the location is only roughly known, the place is flagged “approximate location”. Region outlines are schematic and do not follow modern states.

A voyage or a campaign can have a route: an ordered list of points joined by a line. A route is an approximate reconstruction. Its points carry no dates of their own, so the atlas does not say where the traveller was at any given moment, only the order of the points. The route of the travels of Marco Polo is an example.

For a few events the card adds a short sourced summary with a note on what the map shows for that event, and the catalogue points of its place or route listed as text. Like the map itself, it is meant for orientation, not as a survey.

Two parts of an event card can look alike but mean different things.

• Meanwhile in the world lists events of other regions whose dates overlap a window around the event: one, five or twenty-five years on either side, as you choose in the card. It is a filter by time and region. It shows what else was going on, not that those events influenced one another.
• Connections lists relations that are recorded in the data or derived from it, and labels each group. An explicit link says that an event is a cause, a consequence, a part or a whole of another, or related to it; it is entered in the data and may carry a note. The other groups say only that events share a participant, a place (the same catalogued place or one within about 40 km) or a historical thread, or neighbour each other in that thread.

Only an explicit link states a historical relationship. A shared participant, a shared place, an adjacent date or a nearby dot on the map helps navigation and is not evidence of cause. Overlap in time alone never establishes causation.

The atlas is built with AI assistants. They are used to draft and structure records, to translate between English and Russian, to prepare imports from structured outside data such as Wikidata, and to write and change the software. The project’s working rules describe two steps for a change: one AI system prepares the change and runs its own checks; a separate, independent AI review then examines the finished version against the assignment, runs usage scenarios and looks at risky parts of the code before the change is released.

That review can establish that a change does what was requested, that the data pass the structural checks, and that pages and controls behave as described in the cases that were tried. It cannot establish that every historical statement is correct, that every cited work supports its sentence, or that older records were re-checked after the fact. Both the drafting and the review are done by AI systems. Nothing on this page establishes review by an outside human historian or an editorial board, and the atlas carries no scientific or academic certification. Authorship is not published for each record, so no record should be assumed to have been written or checked by a person, or by AI alone.

AI-assisted drafting and translation can introduce errors: wrong or invented details, mistranslations, wrong dates or calendar conversions. That is why each event lists its sources and why the atlas has a way to report mistakes.

Mistakes are reported inside the interactive atlas. Open an event there and press “Report an error” at the bottom of its card; participants and threads have the same link. The same form also opens from the feedback button in the top bar and from “Send feedback” in the account menu. You do not need an account.

In the form:

• choose what the message is about: an error in the data, an idea, a bug on the site or something else;
• write what is wrong and what is right; a link to a source helps a lot;
• the event you opened is attached unless you untick it, and the page address and language are always sent with the message;
• if you are not signed in, an email address is optional and is used only if a reply is needed.

What happens next: the message is stored, and site administrators read it in an inbox where each message can be marked new, seen, done or spam. A reply by email is possible only if an address is available, there is no guaranteed reply time, and a report does not promise a change. A correction is made in the data, which is validated again before it is imported, and every change to the data is recorded as a revision (who, when, before and after).

The atlas and its form need JavaScript. This text page has no form and does not publish an email address, so without JavaScript there is currently no other way to send a report from the site.

• The atlas is a selection of events, not a complete record of world history; do not assume equal coverage of every period and region.
• It does not guarantee the accuracy of any date, place, name, translation or connection.
• No peer review, scientific certification or institutional endorsement is claimed.
• For research, cite the sources listed on each event card rather than the atlas itself.