What is WikiWar?

WikiWar is the audacious project to animate all of World War II in Google Earth.

What makes WikiWar unique?

All archive data is referenced.

No content is added to the archive unless it has a valid reference. That reference can be a scan of a primary source document, a book, or a website or Wikipedia article. As well, we require a quotation from that source reference. This rigor results in collected data that is focused more on the reference and less on the contributor's bias.

Multiple conflicting accounts of any event are accommodated.

There is no single "correct" account of any given battle. Every participant and observer had a unique perspective. Often these perspectives conflict with each other. Rather than attempt to synthesize these conflicting accounts into a single "correct" version of history, WikiWar allows you to explore what really happened.

Imprecision is tracked for every entry.

One of our favourite definitions of history is, "a plank from the shipwreck of time." A big reason that historians and GIS professionals typically don't get along very well is that the GIS folks strive for greater and greater degrees of precision, such as plotting an event marker to the nearest square centimetre. Historians, on the other hand, struggle to account for greater and greater degrees of imprecision. A primary aim of WikiWar is to accommodate both ends of the spectrum. We do this by tracking three elements of imprecision:

• Time — did the event happen within a minute, hour, day, week, or month of the specified time?
• Location — is the placemarker accurate within a metre? 10m? 1km? 100km?
• Unit — do we know the exact Division, Brigade, Regiment, Battalion, Company, Platoon?