Build one yourself,
one article at a time.

Open the editor →

Why most articles need nothing

Wikidata records where things are and when they happened. Battle of Waterloo has both — 18 June 1815, and a point in Belgium — so adding it costs you one paste and nothing else. Congress of Vienna, the same. What breaks the pattern are the things that moved: French invasion of Russia has a date and no coordinates, because a campaign across a continent is not anywhere in particular. That one asks you.

Erask deliberately does not guess. It could follow the article to the country it belongs to and use that — but a French invasion of Russia would land on the centroid of the Russian Empire, in the Urals. A plausible dot in the wrong place is the worst way to be wrong, so the editor asks instead.

You do not type coordinates

Asking somebody for a longitude is asking them to leave and come back with homework. So the field that wants a place is not a field: press it and the sheet gets out of the way, the globe is yours, and you put the point where the thing happened. Drag it until it looks right. That is the whole interaction, and it needs no idea of what a coordinate is — you already know where Moscow is.

Everything you add shows up on the globe as you go, so the story takes shape while you build it rather than at the end. Dates are typed, in whatever form you have one: a year alone is enough for something you only know the decade of, and a full date when you have it. There is a button that puts the list back in the order things happened, because articles come to mind in an order that is almost never the one they occurred in — and that order is what the globe plays back.

The story is the link

Nothing is stored and there is no account. What you build lives entirely in its own address, and that address is readable:

Three events. The first and the third are just an identifier, because Wikidata already knows their date and place. The middle one carries the coordinates you typed. This is why the links stay short enough to paste into a chat — fifty events fit in half a kilobyte — and why a story you make today still opens in a year: the text comes from Wikipedia at opening time, in the reader's own language.

The same thing an AI does

The prompt for language models produces exactly this format. So a story you build by hand and one written by ChatGPT are indistinguishable when opened — and you can take a generated story, press Edit, and fix what the model got wrong. That last part is the reason the editor exists: models are fast and confidently inaccurate, and until now there was no way to correct one.

What it will not do

• Up to fifty events. Past that the timeline becomes a comb and resolving the articles no longer fits in one request.
• Every event needs a date and a place. The editor will not let you copy a link until they all have both — the globe would silently drop the rest, which is worse than being stopped.
• Curated stories cannot be edited. They are checked by hand and live in files; opening one here would make a disconnected copy, not a correction.
• Nothing is saved. Close the tab before copying the link and the story is gone. Copy early.

Where to start

Pick something you already know well — a war, a life, a band's tours — and add five or six articles. The interesting part comes when you press play and see them in an order you knew but had never watched.

Open the editor →