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Just imagine a web application, which shows you exactly, how people used to live in earlier times and what their deeds were! Imagine an application that can show you historic connections in all their details! A program, in which you can determine what geographic or historic part of history you would like to see and decide on the depth of detail and speed, at which the film is played. Imagine for example, you can see before your very eyes, in all details, the discovery of America – from the voyages to the wars of independence and beyond! Imagine, you can even present your own personal vita and that of your ancestors in a historic context and – last not least – imagine you could turn back the wheel of history and throw the dice for a completely different historic scenario than that, which has happened.

All this the WIKISTORIA-Project offers to you. Our aim is to develop a software and set up a site, into which all events of human history can be entered on to an interactive world map and shown graphically.

The basic idea of the WIKSTORIA-Project is the reconstruction of the whole of history of mankind, starting from its roots in Africa to the Ancient World and now the Modern Age. For this purpose, in a film, historic events are made visible by changes in the map – such as animated symbols or a colour-underlay of a state's boundaries. By doing this, historic events like wars, voyages of discovery, migration of people or for example the discovery of and settlements in America, can be made transparent by animation.

For the historic understanding it is absolutely necessary to grasp global interdependencies, as the following example will show:

In 1434 the Chinese emperor Zhentong ordered that the imperial expedition fleet was put out of commission, because of an enormous budget deficit and all this after important voyages of discovery in previous years, under the famous general Zheng He, who sailed as far as Africa. In the same year, the Portuguese Gil Eanes sailed around Cap Bojador on the West coast of Africa, which is considered an important step in the search of a seapassage to India and also in terms of European expansion.

If one can see on the screen, how the Chinese navy withdraws, while the European one grows bigger at the same time, it is very easy to understand that one or two lost ships, (meaning a set-back for the European urge for discovery) and one or two bumper harvests, (enabling the Chinese emperor to continue the budgeting of expeditions), could have made the 2^nd millennium already a Chinese one. It is exactly those interdependencies that we want to depict visually with our WIKISTORIA-project.

any age of time, in any part of the world.

And what's more, you yourself can become part of history. Log in your data and personal history or that of your ancestors as historic events and have them outlined in the scope of relative importance in historic relevance.

And last-not-least WIKISTORIA offers to you the possibility to change existing data at random and thus change the course of history. These personal variations are for you to play exclusivly and give you an idea, which course history would have taken if, (like in the example above), yet the Chinese had discovered Europe in the 15th century, and not vice versa.

By means of a unique software and professional input, WIKISTORIA makes it possible for every interested person, to relive, understand and create history – and all this – free of charge.

WIKISTORIA – How to live, understand and create history.

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