Atlas causal

What this is

The history of the world since 1415 as a graph: every event linked to what caused it and what it led to, with sources. The atlas shows the same records as a map, a timeline and a graph. Each event is a point in the graph. A place is where an event happened. Actors are the people, states and institutions in an event, and territories are the land those actors held. An edge is a link from a cause to a consequence. Each edge has a type, a confidence level and a written argument with its sources.

Pick an event and follow its consequences. At any event you reach, the atlas also shows the other branches that led to it. This keeps one chain from looking like the whole explanation.

Who makes it

One person makes the atlas, with an assistant. Most of the records are drafts taken from Wikipedia and Wikidata. The card of each one names the article and the revision it was read at. Every causal link has a written argument and at least one source, and its card says how sure the atlas is of it. A person is reading the drafts one at a time. Add ?review=1 to any address to see the review state of each record, as that person sees it.

The territories and many of the states are imports. They come from other people's datasets and keep each dataset's licence and the limits its makers state. An import never signs a record and never rewrites a record a person has signed.

How sure the atlas is

The confidence level of a link depends on its sources, so a reader can check it. Where historians disagree, the atlas says so and names them. It does not pick a side.

consensus

Historians accept the link. It needs at least two cited sources by different authors. Two sources are not enough on their own: a reviewer still judges whether they agree.

probable

The cited sources support the link, and the atlas knows of no historian who disagrees. Most edges have this level.

disputed

Historians disagree about the link itself: whether it exists, what type it is, or how much weight it carries. The card names who disagrees.

Licences

The atlas uses four licences. One licence cannot cover the code, the written records and two imported datasets.

• The code is under MIT.
• The records, meaning everything a person wrote, are under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• The coastlines come from Natural Earth, which is public domain and asks to be credited.
• The territories are under neither of those. From 1886 they are under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, because CShapes 2.0 is, and that licence forbids commercial use. Before 1886 they are under GPL-3.0, because Historical Basemaps is. They sit in their own directories, every file names its licence, and nothing from them is ever copied into a record somebody wrote.

Once the atlas merges a paragraph by somebody else, it can no longer change its licence. So the choice of licence is final. The full credits are in data/LICENSE and data/geo/LICENSE. The list of sources is at sources.html.

Contributions

Contributions are not open yet. The maintainer is still testing the record format on the first period. Moving a hundred contributors' records to a new format is much harder than moving one person's own. So the maintainer will build and test the contribution process before opening it. When it opens, a form will build a bundle of records, check it in your browser against the records already here, and open one issue in the repository. A person will still read the argument, the sources and the confidence before merging anything, and will merge nothing without sources.

How the atlas is drawn explains the rest at length: every symbol on the map, what the colours mean, how to read a card, what the lanes are, and why the territories stop where they do. In the repository, CONTEXT.md gives the reasons behind the project, ARCHITECTURE.md its structure, and STATUS.md what is built so far.