How the record was built

What counts as an entry

An entry is a specific thing people did for the first time or did notably better: an invention, a discovery, a world first, a major improvement, a cultural milestone, a social or legal innovation, or a feat such as a voyage or an ascent. Each entry is credited to the present-day country where the work was done, with any other countries that share credit listed alongside. Multinational projects such as CERN are credited to International.

How it was compiled

The record was compiled in October 2026 with an AI model, Anthropic's Claude, working country by country and period by period from its training knowledge. Each section was written to a common specification, checked for format, and then merged. Near-duplicates (the same event described twice under different names) were found by comparing names, descriptions, years and countries, and merged into one entry. In this second edition another 156 duplicates were found and merged, as described below. The result is 38,888 entries from 197 countries and territories.

Because the entries come from a language model's knowledge rather than from a team of historians working through archives, treat any single entry the way you would treat a well-read reference book: usually right, sometimes wrong in the details, and worth checking against its sources before you rely on it.

How government types were assigned

Each entry is classed by the government in power where and when the work was done. The class comes from a timeline of each country's main regime periods, refined by the historical state named in the entry, so Soviet work counts as communist and Venice or Florence count as republics. There are eight classes:

Democracy

Competitive elections with broad suffrage choose the government. Includes parliamentary monarchies such as today's Britain or Japan, and classical Athens.

Oligarchy or limited government

Elected bodies hold real power but a narrow elite or electorate chooses them: the Roman Republic, Venice, the Dutch Republic, Britain from 1689 to 1917, the early United States.

Monarchy or empire

Hereditary or self-proclaimed rulers with no effective elected check.

Authoritarian regime

Military, fascist, personalist, theocratic or non-communist single-party rule, and regimes whose elections aren't competitive.

Communist state

Marxist-Leninist one-party states such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Colony or dependent territory

Ruled by a foreign power after 1450, including protectorates, mandates and wartime occupation.

Tribal or pre-state society

Before the first state in the territory, or where the form of government is unknown.

International

Multinational projects.

On the home page and in the combined view, the first two are grouped as democratic and the next three as autocratic. Borderline cases follow simple rules: "democracy" requires competitive elections with at least near-universal male suffrage, so Britain counts from 1918, the United States from 1828 and France's Third Republic from 1870. The classes are deliberately broad, so treat the shares as approximate.

How the sources were found and checked

Every entry was given up to four suggested sources, preferring at least one primary source (the original paper, patent, official record or text) plus scholarly secondary works such as university-press books and peer-reviewed articles. General encyclopedias are allowed as one source at most and never alone. Wikipedia and sites that copy it are never used. Where no source could be named with confidence, the entry says so instead of guessing.

• 83,583 suggested citations in all.
• 32,028 entries have two or more suggested sources, 3,945 have one, and 2,915 have none the model was confident of. These counts measure suggestions, not verified sources.
• 23,028 entries carry a note on disputes over priority, dating or credit, and 251 a note where the sources disagree with the entry's date, place or people. Both are shown on each entry.

The citations were also written by the AI model, from its knowledge, without web access. To measure how reliable they are, 380 citations were drawn at random and checked by a separate pass with web access against library catalogues, publisher pages, DOI records and patent offices:

• 338 were confirmed as real works that cover the entry.
• 8 were real and relevant but had a detail wrong, such as a year or page range, and were corrected.
• 25 were confirmed to exist, but whether they cover the specific entry couldn't be confirmed.
• 9 were wrong, mostly real works about a neighbouring event, and were removed or replaced.
• None were invented works.

Each citation that was checked is marked in the downloads and on the Browse page. The rest haven't been checked one by one, so the sample rates above are the best guide to how far to trust them. No entry has yet been checked by a person.

The automated second pass

A separate automated research pass then went through every entry. It searched Wikidata, the reference lists of matching Wikipedia articles and OpenAlex, an index of scholarly papers, fetched what it found, and recorded whether each page or abstract mentions the entry's key terms. It also flagged entries whose sources seemed to give another year, whose government type looked wrong, whose claim to be first seemed questioned, or which looked like duplicates. Every flag was then reviewed, and the decision and reason for each one is in edition_changes.csv.

• Links. 2,050 links on 1,408 entries are shown as found and matched automatically. Links were left out when only one or two of the entry's key terms matched, or when they point to library catalogue, census or search pages, which match on a name rather than the claim. A matching page is a lead, not proof: in a random sample most were about the entry, but some only shared its words.
• Dates. 206 entries were flagged because a source mentioned other years near the claim. On review none was a different date for the same event: the numbers were page and catalogue numbers, measurements, publication years, the ends of a date range, or the dates of other events. No years were changed.
• Government types. 675 entries were flagged because the government at the time differed from the start of the country's current constitution, such as France's Third Republic before the 1958 constitution, or Athens before modern Turkey. That comparison isn't a test of the classification, and 674 of the 675 were right. One was corrected.
• Duplicates. The pass found 19 groups of entries with the same name. Thirteen were the same event entered twice and were merged, keeping their sources. The rest were kept as separate entries and renamed: independent discoveries made at the same time in different countries, or an object and its later excavation. Because the pass only caught identical names, a follow-up scan compared similar names across the whole record and found 142 more duplicates, such as separate entries for the start and the completion of the Thames Tunnel; each was checked and merged the same way.
• Firsts. 32 entries were flagged because a source used words such as "predates" or "contested". Three already said the claim is disputed, two got a new note, and in the rest the source used the word about something else, or the match was on a word such as "predator".

The pass's raw output, including its Wikidata matches, coordinates and images, is in the downloads. Its Wikidata matches aren't used on the site yet: a sample of even its most confident matches included wrong articles.

What the counts can and can't show

The charts on this site count entries. That makes them a measure of this record as much as of history, and several things other than freedom push the counts up or down:

• Documentation. Countries whose history is well written up in English, and recent decades, are easier to cover in depth. The record almost certainly over-represents Europe and North America for that reason, which flatters the democracies of the last two centuries.
• Population and wealth. The counts aren't adjusted for how many people lived under each kind of government, or how rich they were. Richer countries have more scientists, more patents and more museums, whatever their government.
• Most of history was monarchy. Before about 1800 nearly every state was a monarchy or empire, so most early achievements are credited to them. Comparisons are only fair within the same era.
• Strong counterexamples exist. The Soviet space programme, Song dynasty China, the Abbasid golden age and Meiji Japan all produced a great deal under unelected rule. Any argument about freedom and progress has to account for them.

The fairest tests compare like with like: free and unfree countries in the same decades, measured per person, or natural experiments such as East and West Germany or North and South Korea. Scholars disagree about how much institutions explain. Joel Mokyr and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that open, inclusive institutions drive sustained innovation; others point to state-led successes as evidence that the picture is more mixed.

Corrections

If an entry is wrong, missing, credited to the wrong country or government, or cites a source that doesn't support it, email [email protected] with the entry's name and what the sources say. Corrections are folded into the next edition.