Software Update and Downtime over the Weekend (2026-02-06/08)
Dear community. FactGrid will have a downtime over the weekend due to a Software Update. The database will be on read only or off-line for a while, we will see. Join our mailinglist at https://www.listserv.dfn.de/sympa/info/factgrid-community if you want to always stay informed. Best wishes, --Olaf Simons (talk) 18:10, 6 February 2026 (CET)
Read-only time is about to begin and will last at least until the morning (CET), and potentially longer depending on how long the update takes. Hopefully the wiki should stay available for basic read-only functionality (viewing items), though other features may be temporarily broken (e.g. Special:WhatLinksHere is known to be affected by a database schema change). The query service is expected to stay available throughout. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 00:56, 7 February 2026 (CET)
FactGrid is now running on MediaWiki 1.43. (Some post-upgrade maintenance and cleanup is still happening, and we may also enable some more extensions, as mentioned on the mailing list.) --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 20:03, 7 February 2026 (CET)
QuickStatements
Note that the new QuickStatements Version has an annoying security feature implemented on regular user accounts: If you press "Run" you will receive loads of errors after the 90th edit. To avoid this you must use the "Run in background" option.
We hope we can get this obstacle removed, but for the time being we run the platform with Wikidata-settings. --Olaf Simons (talk) 12:24, 13 March 2023 (CET)
27. Nov. 2025: Anne Purschwitz and Olaf Simons, "Europe in Persecution; Concentration and Internment Camps of the Second World War in a Larger Context" Article on the EHRI blog about the FactGrid that started in 2024, https://t.co/uuQX3Ejjaw
25 Nov. 2025: A design study for the next generation FactGrid viewer (in German, but generously depicted) – on our blog: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/4216
7 Sept. 2025: New on our blog: Michael Wermke, "Knowledge, Networks, and Digital History: A FactGrid-Powered Study of 19th-Century Jewish Educators", https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/4082
4 Sept. 2025: The Arolsen team is presently importing a test data set of all the detainees of Dachau's concentration camp — some 160,000 items. It will be a challenge to spot "known" people in this mass. We are all curious how this will develop as we are considering to expand this input across the entire national socialist camp system with its 27 main camps and their numerous subsidies.
25 May 2024: New on our blog, post by Sven Jaros with data modelling challenges: "Modelling Premodern Political Entities — Case Studies from Eastern Europe" — https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/3642
18 Mar. 2024: New on our blog "A software that does Julian and Gregorian calendars — or why Wikibase is about to mess up two millennia of historical dates" — https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/3467.
14 Mar. 2024: Basic input of The Erik-Amburger-Database run by the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Regensburg. The dataset covers over 95.000 records of European foreigners who (temporarily) lived in Russia from the 17th into the early 20th century. See the project page FactGrid:Erik-Amburger-Datenbank for the entire data set and the respective discussion page for challenges and significance of successive import.
11 Dec. 2023: FactGrid is now offering an online version of Katrin Moeller's Ontology of the historical German-language nomenclature for offices and professions (OhdAB). You can download the entire set of over 40,000 professions with their ontology with the short link https://kurzelinks.de/OhdAB. You can also use the OhdAB for statistics on your data sets on FactGrid - see FactGrid:OhdAB-Datenbank
16 Jul. 2023: New on our blog (in German but you will know how to get it translated): Eckard Rolf's classification of non-literary text types to be used on the "Type of work property" P121: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/3061. The entire vocabulary is so far a test case of a first structured "controlled" vocabulary. The English, French and Spanish versions of the terms still need to be checked, English is 60% checked, French and Spanish basically machine translated. See https://tinyurl.com/2atg9fqy for the synopsis.
Jour fixe
It has been proposed to have a weekly jour fixe on Thursdays 21:30 CET (a time equally (in)convenient to all our teams around the world). FactGrid has an open web channel for such purposes that can be used without further passwords and software downloads. Contact olaf.simons@pierre-marteau.com for link details.
Welcome!
to the FactGrid database, a project of the Gotha Research Centre operated by the computer lab of the Thuringian State and University Library (ThULB) in Jena. With the support of Wikimedia Germany we are using a MediaWiki with Wikidata's “wikibase” extension. Our main product are data which we collect on “items” such as these:
You will need to be logged in to see the “add statement” link with which you can add information in the form of triple based machine readable claims — which everyone can now explore with the SPARQL data mining language, at our Query Service. All FactGrid data are CC0-licensed. You can download any search in various data formats with the aim to explore FactGrid data in other software environments or visualise searches with various tools on our site.
Visit our
FactGrid FAQ for more information on why you might love to use FactGrid as your research platform
Project Section to take a look at work done on the collective platform
The FactGrid database is an open collaborative and multilingual project organised by — as of December 2025 — 708 participants / by language / by gender from all over the world. If you are looking for a site to present research data and keep them in the process of further research — the FactGrid database might be a cool candidate. For more information and account details contact:
Dr. Olaf Simons
Historisches Datenzentrum Sachsen-Anhalt
Emil-Abderhalden-Str. 26-27
06108 Halle (Saale)
