This Tool Turns Any Wikipedia Topic Into an Interactive Timeline
When studying any topic, it can be helpful to get an idea of when major events occurred in relation to each other. History textbooks typically use a timeline for this, a chronological chart showing when various events occurred. WikiTimeline is a free website that uses a large language model to turn any Wikipedia article into a visual timeline that you can use to view major events in sequence.
The open nature of Wikipedia means that there are all sorts of third-party tools that use articles in interesting ways. There’s WikiTok, a sort of TikTok for Wikipedia , which lets you scroll through articles to explore topics in random order. WikiTimeline is another such tool that puts free and open information into a new context. To get started, just go to the home page and search for something – you’ll see suggested articles.
Select the article you want to turn into a timeline. WikiTimeline will scan the article, note everything in the article that happened on a certain date, and then compile it all into a timeline. You can start researching right now. You can click on any item to read more information, usually the year and a brief one-sentence description of the event. You can zoom in and out depending on how busy the timeline is, and use the arrows on the side to navigate between events. You can also add multiple articles to the same timeline, allowing you to compare the relative history of two people or organizations.
You can then copy the URL to your timeline and share it. If you want to embed the timeline on your website, an embed code is provided. You can even customize the color scheme if you wish.
As for the timing themselves, they are pretty good. I would argue that they are more useful as a quick learning aid than anything as authoritative as a time frame in a history textbook. And all the usual nuances that apply to large language models apply here: they can get facts wrong or miss certain things. The About page recommends reading the Wikipedia article: “Our tool is intended to be a visual aid and should not be used as the sole source of information.”
In other words, it’s best to think of this tool as a visual addition. Although this is potentially useful.