Terms of service

Welcome to WhenAtlas. By using this website you agree to these terms; if you do not agree, please do not use the site.

What the service is

WhenAtlas is a free, advertising-supported interactive atlas of history: an interactive map and timeline of polities, conflicts, people and other historical subjects, together with machine-readable downloads of the same data.

Own content: CC BY 4.0

• The content of this site — entity articles, scenario timelines, and machine-readable exports (GeoJSON / CSV) — is licensed to you under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).
• You may copy, adapt, and reuse it, commercially or otherwise, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made.
• Attribution in practice: cite 'WhenAtlas' with a link to the entity page or to whenatlas.com, and keep the per-record source citations when reusing the dataset.

Third-party layers and media

• Underlying territory geometry comes from Cliopatria (CC BY 4.0) and OpenHistoricalMap (CC0); the basemap is served by OpenFreeMap.
• Images and quotations embedded in entity pages carry their own licence and attribution, shown with the asset.
• Those licences and attributions flow through with the material — reusing a piece means honouring its own licence as well as ours.

Acceptable use

• You may view, link to, and share pages, and reuse open content under the licences above.
• Do not scrape or mirror the site in ways that circumvent the open dataset downloads we already provide.
• Do not interfere with the service, attempt to gain unauthorised access, or use it to distribute malware or unlawful content.
• Video scenarios may be recorded and shared (recording-friendly mode is built for this), so long as borrowed layers and assets keep their own attribution.

Advertising

The site is funded solely by advertising: Google AdSense on the website and the ads shown by the video platforms where our scenario recordings are published. We do not sell goods or data, and there is no paid tier.

No warranty

The site is provided 'as is'. Historical data is compiled from open datasets and carries stated uncertainty (dates and boundaries differ by source); we work to correct errors once identified, but we make no warranty of accuracy, completeness, uninterrupted availability or fitness for any particular purpose. Do not rely on the service as a sole source for decisions that matter.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, WhenAtlas's team is not liable for any indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising from your use of, or inability to use, the site or its data.

Changes to the service and these terms

The atlas is in beta and evolves quickly: features may change or be withdrawn. These terms may change too; the revision date below is the record of the current version. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised terms.

Questions about these terms — or anything else — reach us through the contact page.

Last updated: 2026-09-30