Decades, Centuries and Millennia on Wikipedia

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is reported to have said,

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Our subjective experience of time and events can even be reflected beyond the scale of decades, as blogger Lucretius, Ver 21c has methodically demonstrated. He compared the length of Wikipedia articles that summarize decades, centuries and millennia, and graphed the analysis to show which periods seem to contain relatively more noteworthy happenings (or, perhaps, simply how much we currently know about them):

lnw-decades

He points out:

Interestingly, the larger the time unit, the less weighted Wikipedia is to the past in terms of article count: 5% of the decade articles, 13% of the century articles, and 35% of the millennium articles pertain to the future.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

More from Long-term Thinking

What is the long now?

The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.

Learn more

Join our newsletter for the latest in long-term thinking