How multilingual Wikipedia viewpoints differ
The same event is written differently across Wikipedia languages, and Annalium ingests up to nine so a planned side-by-side compare can surface the gaps.
Wikipedia is not one encyclopedia but many, written in parallel by different communities. The English article about an event and the Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian article about the same event are not translations of each other. They are independent texts, drawing on different sources, emphasizing different details, and reflecting the concerns of different readerships. Which dates are stressed, which figures are named, what is treated as cause versus consequence, and even what the event is called can diverge — sometimes subtly, sometimes sharply.
Annalium ingests events in up to nine Wikipedia languages — English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Korean — and stores each language as its own field rather than collapsing them into a single canonical version. That preserves the differences instead of erasing them, which matters because the differences are often the most interesting part. A history map that only ever showed you one language's framing would quietly teach you that there is only one framing.
A side-by-side viewpoint comparison — letting you read how two language editions tell the same event next to each other — is planned for a later release and is not yet live. We want to be accurate about that: today you get the per-language data and a link back to each source article, but the dedicated compare view is still ahead of us. Until then, every event already links to its Wikipedia source, so you can follow any marker into the article and its attribution, switch languages, and see for yourself how the account changes with the telling.
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Events from Wikipedia/Wikidata (CC-BY-SA); boundaries from OpenHistoricalMap (ODbL). Spotted a mistake? Email [email protected].