How we date people
Who Was Alive shows who was alive at the same time as whom, and how old each person was. It covers 1,962 of the best-known people in history, measured by how many language editions of Wikipedia have an article about them.
Where the dates come from
Every birth and death date comes from Wikidata, the free knowledge base behind Wikipedia, released as CC0. Each page links to the Wikidata entry and the Wikipedia article it draws on. The site is rebuilt at the start of every month, so a correction made on Wikidata shows up here within a month.
Who is covered
The site takes the 1,962 people with a Wikipedia article in the most languages (90 or more) whose dates can be placed. Births run from 1813 BC to 2007, and 582 of them are living. Coverage is thin before about 1500 and strongest from the 1800s on: 382 of them were alive in 1900 and 841 in 1980.
How we handle uncertainty
- Ranges, not guesses. When a date is known only to the year, month or decade, or when sources disagree, we use the whole range. The timeline fades the ends of a lifeline over that range, and the text gives the range (for example “c. 1450” or “102–100 BC”).
- Claims only when they hold for the whole range. We say two people were alive at the same time only if that is true for every date in both ranges. We give an age only when it is certain to within a year; “33 or 34” means the exact day is not known.
- People we leave out. We leave a person out when their birth or death is known only to the century, when the recorded dates disagree by more than 25 years, when there is no death date for someone born before 1910, or when there is no English Wikipedia article to cite. That rule removes 38 of the 2,000 most-linked people, including many ancient figures.
- BC and the calendar. There is no year 0: 1 BC is followed by AD 1. Dates recorded in the Julian calendar are converted to one continuous count of days before ages and overlaps are worked out, so a Julian birthday and a Gregorian one compare correctly.
- Ages on the timeline. When you drag across a timeline, the number next to each name is the age that person reached during the year under the cursor.
Who makes this
Who Was Alive is a Moltke Benjaminsen Alpha project. Write to info@moltkebenjaminsen.com.