About the atlas

The Atlas of Battles is a reference to the placed battles, sieges and naval engagements of recorded history, from the Bronze Age to 1991. It has two faces: an interactive globe you move through in time and space, and a page for each of the 16,042 engagements, with hubs by war, commander, country, US state, century and date, contested ground and ranked lists.

Sources

• Wikidata (wikidata.org) supplies the list of engagements: every item classed as a battle, siege or naval battle that carries coordinates, with its label, dates, the war it is part of, participants, images and the number of language editions that describe it. Wikidata is released under the CC0 1.0 public domain dedication.
• English Wikipedia infoboxes supply result, territorial change, belligerents, commanders, strength and casualties for 10,969 engagements. Facts are not subject to copyright; the article text is not reproduced, and each page names the article revision and the date it was read. Wikipedia text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Wikimedia Commons supplies images and portraits under public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA terms only; each image carries its author and licence. Images are served from Commons.
• Natural Earth (naturalearthdata.com) supplies the relief on the globe, the page maps (coastlines, rivers, lakes, borders, towns) and the present-day boundaries used to place engagements. Public domain.

What the atlas computes

Everything beyond the record itself is computed from the whole set: the nearest engagements and their bearings, the position of each engagement in its war's timeline, the ground fought over repeatedly, the route of each commander from one engagement to the next, the counts by century and country, the ranked lists.

Method

Each engagement keeps its Wikidata identifier, so the record can always be traced. Present-day country and US state come from the coordinates and Natural Earth boundaries, not from the historical state. The tier of an engagement (landmark, major, notable) is the count of Wikipedia language editions that describe it: forty or more is a landmark, twenty a major, ten a notable engagement. The globe opens with notable engagements only.

Dates carry their recorded precision (day, month, year, decade or century); 7,541 engagements are dated to the day. Dates recorded in the Julian calendar are shown as such, so the Battle of Hastings is 14 October 1066. Years before AD 1 are labelled BC.

The atlas stops at 1991. Wars are the Wikidata part of chain climbed to the enclosing war; a campaign or front is sometimes the best Wikidata offers, and the page says which. Coordinates can be approximate, especially for ancient engagements whose sites are disputed; a page shows the recorded site and makes no claim beyond it.

Corrections

Errors in a record are best fixed at the source, on Wikidata or in the Wikipedia infobox; the atlas is rebuilt from the sources and picks up corrections at the next rebuild.

Who makes it

The atlas is built and maintained by Central Coast GIS, a small independent publisher of map-based reference sites. It is supported by display advertising; see the privacy page.