About the data
Where these 11,600 years of events come from, how each one was checked, and what we still cannot promise.
What is in here
5,378 events, each with a time, a place, a short summary in three languages, and a list of sources. Coverage runs from the Neolithic to 2025 CE, across ten world regions.
Events are assembled by an automated pipeline, not typed in by hand. Every record passes format checks, a distribution report, an AI review pass, and a frozen regression sample before it is published.
Sources and licences
Summaries are written from verified facts, not copied. The underlying evidence comes from:
- Wikidata CC0 1.0structured facts — dates, coordinates, classifications
- Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0narrative text used as evidence for dates and places
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre © UNESCOofficial World Heritage listings — the only third-party source independent of the Wikimedia family
- OpenStreetMap ODbLbase map tiles
Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA 4.0 and OpenStreetMap data is ODbL; both require attribution, which this page provides. Our own summaries are original prose written from checked facts.
How a record is checked
Dates and places are normalised first: a date known only to a century is stored as a century, never as a false exact year. A location that is schematic rather than a precise site is marked as such on the map.
Records that fail a structural rule are held back rather than published with a guess. Where sources disagree beyond reconciliation, the record is withheld — we would rather have a gap than a wrong date.
What we cannot promise
493（9%） events have at least one source independent of the Wikimedia family. The remaining 4,885（91%） rest on Wikidata and the Wikipedias, which count as a single source family.
For 1,428（27%） of them the founding date comes from a structured record while the accompanying text sources state no matching date — mostly World Heritage sites, whose articles often describe the site without giving a founding year. Those records are marked as such in the detail view.
So this is not a cross-verified dataset. It is a sourced one: every fact tells you where it came from, and you can check it yourself.
Found something wrong? That is useful — the pipeline is rerun regularly and corrections feed back into it.
What the data actually looks like
These three tables are computed from the dataset, not written in. The distribution is itself information — including where it is unflattering.
Region × millennium
| 9600–3000 BC | 30th–20th c. BC | 20th–10th c. BC | 10th c. BC–AD 1 | 1–1000 | 1001–2000 | 2001– | Σ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Europe | 6 | 11 | 16 | 166 | 261 | 1975 | 44 | 2479 |
| West Asia | 6 | 19 | 22 | 58 | 171 | 287 | 16 | 579 |
| East Asia | 3 | 14 | 21 | 114 | 401 | 20 | 573 | |
| North America | 3 | 11 | 382 | 36 | 432 | |||
| South Asia | 4 | 4 | 13 | 49 | 261 | 16 | 347 | |
| Central & South America | 3 | 3 | 6 | 17 | 242 | 10 | 281 | |
| North Africa | 1 | 12 | 16 | 22 | 35 | 156 | 5 | 247 |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 2 | 1 | 2 | 15 | 166 | 19 | 205 | |
| Oceania | 3 | 121 | 7 | 131 | ||||
| Central Asian steppe | 12 | 20 | 69 | 3 | 104 |
Europe and East Asia are visibly denser. That is partly true and partly the shape of the source: measured in August 2026, Wikidata holds 3390 21st-century items for Europe and 238 for Central Asia, a fourteenfold gap.
We measured whether our own screening is skewed: regional pass rates mostly sit between 1% and 4%, with Europe at 1.2% near the bottom and sub-Saharan Africa highest at 9.8%. The sparseness comes mainly from the density of verifiable material, not from choices made here. Worth filling — but filling it will not reach European volume, because there is less to find.
Evidence strength
Corroborated means one Tier A source or two independent Tier B families. Most records still rest on a single family — Wikidata and the language Wikipedias count as one. Only the World Heritage subset currently has an independent third party (UNESCO).
Time precision
Only year-precise records are treated as having happened in that year. Century-level records appear on year pages under around this period, marked approximate — treating an interval as an exact date would spread one record across hundreds of pages and misstate it.
4,680 records carry an image (87%)
Contact & corrections
Spotted an error in a fact, date, coordinate or translation, or an event that should be here and isn’t? Write to: contact@oneworldtimeline.com