It can be useful, while studying any topic, to get an overview of when major events happened relative to each other. History textbooks commonly use a timeline for this—a chronological chart that shows when various events happened. WikiTimeline is a free website that uses a large language model to turn any Wikipedia article into a visual timeline you can use to see major events in a sequence.
Wikipedia’s open nature means there’s all kinds of third party tools that use the articles in interesting ways. There’s WikiTok, a sort of TikTok for Wikipedia, which allows you to scroll through articles to learn topics at random. WikiTimeline is another tool like that, putting the free and open information into a new context. To get started, just head to the home page and search for anything—you will 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 particular date, then compile it all into a timeline. You can start exploring right away. You can click any item to read a few more details, typically the year and a one-sentence summary of the event. You can zoom in and out, depending on how crowded the timeline is, and you can use the arrows on the side to jump between events. You can also add multiple articles to one timeline, allowing you to compare the relative history of two people or organizations.
Credit: Justin Pot
You can then copy the URL to your timeline and share it. An embed code is offered if you want to put the timeline on a website. There’s even the option to customize the color scheme, if you want.
Credit: Justin Pot
As for the timelines themselves, they’re pretty good. I’d say they’re useful as a quick study aid than anything as authoritative as the timelines in a history textbook. And all of the usual nuances that apply to large language models are relevant here—it might get facts wrong or miss certain things. The product’s about page recommends actually reading the Wikipedia article: “Our tool is meant to be a visual aid and should not be used as the sole source of information.”
In other words, it’s probably best to think of this tool as a visual supplement. It’s a potentially useful one, though.