You are going to write an animated map story for Erask (https://erask.org), a globe on which historical events appear one by one, each in its own place, in time order. I want a story about: <<< PUT YOUR SUBJECT HERE >>> Reply with the story's TITLE AS A HYPERLINK — a clickable markdown link, on its own line — and after it a short paragraph on the story you chose to tell and what you had to leave out. Nothing else. Here is a whole answer, complete, for a three-event story. Yours will have far more events and a far longer address, and it will look exactly like this: [Hannibal Crosses](https://erask.org/app/?t=Hannibal+Crosses&d=Three+moves+that+brought+Carthage+to+the+gates&k=Carthage*Rome&c=**where+the+elephants+crossed&s=Siege_of_Saguntum%28-0.2775,39.6758%29@-0218*8!0-Battle_of_the_Rh%C3%B4ne_Crossing%284.8097,44.1383%29@-0217*7!0-Battle_of_Cannae%2816.1325,41.3064%29@-0215*10!1) Three moves, from the siege that broke the treaty to the worst day in Roman military history. I left out the Alps themselves: spectacular, but Wikipedia files the crossing without a place you can put a pin in. Not the bare address, and not inside a code block or backticks: an address of a couple of thousand characters gets broken across lines by chat windows, and half of it stops being clickable. The markdown link is the only shape that survives the trip. If your first instinct is to show the URL so I can check it — don't: I cannot read three thousand characters, and the link is checkable by clicking. Everything else you can do however you like. Reading takes one request and identifying the events takes at most one more; both are below, with the exact addresses. STEP 1 — READ UP ON IT FIRST, THEN CHOOSE THE EVENTS ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Before you pick anything, go and read about the subject. Not to be thorough: to find out what you do not already know. What you can recall unaided is the six turning points everybody can name, and those make a poster. The events that make a story are the ones you find while reading, with their real dates. The cheapest way to read is also the one that protects you. Ask English Wikipedia for everything the overview article LINKS TO — one request, up to five hundred titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=links&plnamespace=0&pllimit=500&titles=Second+Punic+War Every title that comes back is an article that EXISTS, so anything you pick from that list can never be lost on arrival. On the Second Punic War it returns 404 titles, 118 of them battles, sieges and treaties — including "Battle of the Rhône Crossing", which is the one a model working from memory called "Battle of the Rhonus" and lost. Take the same list for the campaign or the period around your subject and you have more candidates than you can fit, all of them real. Then read the overview page itself for the dates and the shape of the thing: which of those events actually turned it, and which are footnotes. Reading is also what stops you inventing names. Working from memory is how one attempt produced "Battle of the Rhonus" and "Battle of Camarina": two events that sound entirely plausible, and neither has an article — so both were lost on arrival. Had the model opened the page on the Punic Wars it would have written "Battle of the Rhône Crossing" and found what Camarina is actually filed under. If you have no way to read anything, say so and work from memory — but then keep to what you are sure of, and prefer the wider article that certainly exists. FIFTY IS THE TARGET. Thirty is the floor, not fifteen: below thirty the globe has almost nothing to play, and what you have written is a summary of the subject rather than a story about it. The detail is the whole point — the six turning points everyone can already name make a poster. After the reading step there is no excuse for stopping early. One request on the overview article comes back with a hundred candidates or more, every one of them real: ask what "List of earthquakes in Italy" links to and 118 articles come back, from Verona in 1117 to Amatrice in 2016. If a list like that gave you a hundred and you used seventeen, you did not run out of events — you stopped looking. The problem is never finding fifty; it is choosing which fifty. Count them before you answer. If the number begins with a one, go back to the list. * Each event must have its own article on English Wikipedia. Write down the article title exactly as it appears there. * Each event must have a PLACE you can put on a map, and a DATE. A battle, a treaty signed in a named city, a landing, a founding, a first performance, a death. For a thing rather than an event — a dish, an invention, a word — use the place and the moment where it takes the form the story is about. * Spread them over the whole span, and over the map when the subject allows it. The globe is the medium: a story that never leaves one city has nothing to show. * Order them by date, oldest first. For each one, note: the article title, a weight from 1 to 10 (how much it matters to THIS story — it becomes the size of the dot, so use the range), a group (the side, faction or phase it belongs to: 2 to 5 groups, reused verbatim, each gets a colour and a line in the legend), the date, and the coordinates. CAPTIONS, ONLY WHERE THEY EARN THEIR PLACE. Under every event Erask already shows Wikidata's own one-line description, in the reader's language, and it costs the link nothing: "Battle of Waterloo — 1815 battle during the War of the Seventh Coalition" needs no help from you. Write a caption where that would leave the reader wondering what actually happened — the turn, the surprise, the reason this event belongs to THIS story. At most 30 characters — an apposition, not a sentence: "where the Guard was broken" is twenty-six. Written like the label under an exhibit in a good museum. Leave the others empty. Keep them tight, because captions used to be the heaviest thing in the link and a link too long to paste into a chat is a story nobody passes on. At thirty characters they no longer are: fifty events with captions where they are needed come to around 3,200 characters, and even one on every single event stays close to 4,200 — about what fifty Q-numbers and seventy-character captions cost today. That is the trade: shorter captions pay for names when you cannot look numbers up, and buy you room when you can. Write the place and the date yourself for every event. Where Wikidata holds them for that item they are used instead, so an unnecessary one costs twenty characters — a missing one costs the whole event, which is dropped on arrival. STEP 2 — Q-NUMBERS IF YOU CAN, NAMES IF YOU CANNOT. NEVER FROM MEMORY ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── There are two ways to name an event, and only one thing you must never do. A Q-number recalled from memory does not fail loudly: it resolves to some other real thing, and the reader sees a confident dot with the wrong name. Measured on a real attempt: fifty dishes, all fifty names right, forty- four Q-numbers wrong — the tamale came out as a lake in Slovakia, hummus as a German punk band, tiramisù as The Simpsons Movie. Whichever form you end up writing, if you can open pages at all, CHECK THE TITLES. That is where the value of this step really is: the Q-number was never the point, catching a title that does not exist was. A verified title works in either form — write the names and let Erask resolve them, or write the numbers yourself. Both arrive at the same place, because Erask makes exactly this call. You do not need code and you do not need fifty requests. Open ONE page: the Wikipedia API, with all your titles separated by | (up to 50 at a time), and read the Q-numbers off the JSON. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&redirects=1&prop=pageprops&ppprop=wikibase_item&titles=Hummus|Falafel|Battle+of+Waterloo The answer holds, for each page, `pageprops.wikibase_item` — that is the Q-number. Two things to watch: * `normalized` and `redirects` map what you asked for onto the title that answered: "Tamales" arrives as "Tamale", and the Q-number is filed under the second. Follow the chain before reading it off. * A page with `"missing"` and no pageprops means there is no article under that exact title. Find the real title and ask again, or drop the event. Do not substitute a Q-number you think is right. Any web tool will do — fetch, browse, search. If you would rather open one page per event, `https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q241987` shows the item's name at the top and that works too, just fifty times over. IF YOU CANNOT OPEN WEB PAGES, WRITE THE NAMES INSTEAD. Do not invent numbers and do not stop: in the sequence, in place of the Q-number, write the exact title of the English Wikipedia article, with `_` for every space and `~` for every hyphen — Battle_of_Waterloo, Baden~Baden, Quebec_City. Erask makes the very same lookup on arrival, from a machine that always has the network, and an event whose title has no article is dropped there. Which means the title has to be one that EXISTS, and this is where a name goes wrong the way a Q-number used to. Do not build a plausible one. Two real losses from one attempt: "Battle of the Rhonus", a Latinism for what English Wikipedia files under "Battle of the Rhône Crossing"; and "Battle of Camarina", a battle that has no article under any name — what happened there is written up as "Sack of Camarina" and as "Roman withdrawal from Africa". So: use the plain modern English form, not the Latin one. And when you are not sure an article exists under the precise name, reach for the WIDER thing that certainly has one — the war, the campaign, the city, the person — and say the particular in the caption. A real event at a coarser name beats a sharp name that resolves to nothing, and it beats one that resolves to a film. Names cost about eleven characters more than a Q-number each, so keep the captions tight and you come out ahead. What you must never do is write a Q-number you have not read off a page today. Fifty confident dots naming the wrong things is worse than no story. STEP 3 — BUILD THE LINK ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── https://erask.org/app/?t=TITLE&d=SUBTITLE&k=GROUPS&c=CAPTIONS&s=SEQUENCE t the title, 2 to 6 words d one line, at most 90 characters, saying what we are about to watch k the groups, separated by * c the captions, separated by *, in the same order as the sequence and EMPTY where an event has none: `c=first**third` leaves the middle one bare. At most 30 characters each, and never a * inside one. Leave `c` out altogether if the story needs no captions at all. s the events, in chronological order, joined by - URL-encode the text (a space becomes +). Inside s leave - * ! @ , readable — the sequence is meant to be legible to a human — but write the coordinate brackets as %28 and %29: inside a markdown link a bare ) ends the link early, and the address would be cut in half. So Q48314%284.4125,50.6803%29@18061815. An event is the Q-number you looked up — or, if you could not look it up, the article title with `_` for spaces and `~` for hyphens — followed, in any order, by the modifiers below. Write the title EXACTLY as Wikipedia files it, disambiguating brackets and all: `Battle_of_Beneventum_(212_BC)` is right, and stripping the bracket to make it look tidier gives a title that does not exist. Those brackets are not confused with the coordinates: a bracket counts as a place only when it holds two numbers. The modifiers: %28lon,lat%29 where it happened. Longitude FIRST, decimal degrees, negative west and south: %284.4125,50.6803%29 is Waterloo. Those are the round brackets, percent-encoded so they cannot end the link. @DDMMYYYY when it happened. Digits only, no separators: @18061815 18 June 1815 @061815 June 1815, day unknown @1815 1815, month unknown @-0057 58 BC — a minus sign and astronomical numbering, in which 1 BC is the year 0, so 58 BC is -0057 *8 the weight, 1 to 10. !2 the group: its position in k, counting from 0. So one event, and a sequence: Q48314%284.4125,50.6803%29@18061815*10!0 s=Q134114%2816.7625,49.1281%29@02121805*9!0-Q179250%2823.90,54.90%29@24061812*10!1 and the same sequence written with names, when the numbers were out of reach: s=Battle_of_Austerlitz%2816.7625,49.1281%29@02121805*9!0-Battle_of_Borodino%2823.90,54.90%29@24061812*10!1 Erask reads the Q-number and fetches the event's name, its description and its article in the reader's own language — which is exactly why the Q-number has to be the right one. What you write in the link is the place, the date, the weight and the group. One more thing about dates: for a battle or a treaty, Wikidata's own date wins and yours only adds precision inside the same year. But for a person, a city or anything that lasts, Wikidata holds a birth or a founding, and there your date is the one that counts — so write it. STEP 4 — THE ANSWER ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The title, linked, on a line of its own — `[Title](https://erask.org/app/?…)` — and nothing around it: no code block, no backticks, no table, no "here is your link", and never the address written out on its own. If you print only one thing correctly in this whole task, print this one: everything else you did is unreachable without it. Then, in a few sentences: what story you chose to tell inside the subject, what you left out and why, and — plainly — any event whose Q-number you could not confirm or whose date you had to reason out rather than read.