A Wiki History of World Events in 100 seconds

In January, Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin produced the Best Visualization at Matt Patterson's History Hackday by visualizing the History of the World using 14,000 events from the English Wikipedia.  These were all events that their parser could match to both a date and a geocoordinate.  The result is this gorgeous (CC-SA) animation, in which continents slowly emerge over time : 




A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.


Guillermo Carvajal summarizes the results:

Podemos ver como la mayoría de documentos entre ese año y 1492 corresponde a Europa, con algunos pocos emergiendo en Asia. Hacia 1492, con la llegada de Colón a América, comienza a aparecer gran actividad en el continente americano.

Lloyd provides links to the raw data and the stages of his manipulation of it on his ragtag blog, and points out 5700 invalid geocoordinates he found, saying "anyone looking to improve Wikipedia's data could have a go at correcting the bad data referenced here".