What 1815 looks like
Open the globe and pick a year →
How it works
Choose a year on the dial and press Look. Erask asks Wikidata five separate questions about that year — what is dated to it, what ended in it, what began, what was founded, and what was already under way — and the globe fills as the answers come back. The first arrive in a few seconds, the last take longer; a bar tells you what is still coming.
Every point opens the Wikipedia article. A filled marker is something that happened; a lighter one is something that was founded — a church, a town, a treaty made permanent.
What is on the globe, and what is only in the list
A point on a map is a claim about where something was. Erask only makes that claim when it can: an event goes on the globe if it has coordinates of its own, or if Wikidata records the place where it happened — Paris for the Treaty of Paris, the Temple of the Tooth for the Kandyan Convention.
Everything else goes in a list under the dial instead of being invented onto the map. In 1815 that list holds the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 and the Hundred Days: things that were unquestionably going on, and that no single point could honestly represent. They are there, with their dates and their first paragraph — just not pretending to be somewhere.
What it will not do
- The biggest things have no place. The Thirty Years' War has 133 language editions, exact dates and no coordinates at all — a war that size is not anywhere. Its sieges are, one by one. So a year gives you what happened on the ground, not the titles of the chapters.
- Some centuries are nearly empty. 1815 has 779 dated things in Wikidata; the year 1001 has 23. That is not a limit of the search — it is how much was recorded, and the dial shows it.
- Round years lie. A church dated «11th century» is stored as 1001, so that year collects twenty times the foundations of 1003. The numbers are real; the precision is not.
- It reads Wikidata live, so it is as current as the database and as slow as the database is that day.
Where to start
Try a year you already know something about — the one you were born, or one you studied. The interesting part is never the thing you were looking for: it is the two things beside it that nobody mentioned in the same breath.