Annual Report 2023

In collaboration with Oxford University Press, we have launched the Ink of Ages Fiction Prize. This is World History Encyclopedia's international historical and mythological short story contest. We received 148 submissions of historical short stories!

Our panel of judges was made up of editors (from both World History Encyclopedia and Oxford University Press), historians, archaeologists, and authors. Collaboratively, they selected three winning stories and two highly commended stories, along with a shortlist and a longlist. We encourage you to read the winning stories!

We intend to continue the prize in 2024 and the coming years and add a youth section as well. 

Even though World History Encyclopedia is the most-read history website in the world, it turns out there are still many, many people who have never heard of us. In 2023, the team made it a strategic priority to increase brand awareness. This took many different forms:

• Email outreach to teachers and librarians

• Presence at conferences and trade shows

• Flyers in local libraries

• Promotional exchanges with podcasts and magazines

Even though it is near-impossible to attribute brand awareness to any single outreach activity, we have seen a marked increase in links to our website and citations of World History Encyclopedia in the second half of 2023.

The translation department and its countless volunteer translators have toiled throughout the year to arrive at 8,000 translated articles across 41 languages. This is an amazing achievement in itself!

As a result, we have seen that an increasing number of our readers come from countries that are not English-speaking. At the time of writing, around a third of our visitors read our encyclopedia in a language other than English. We are very excited about this, as it shows how important it is to provide people with resources in their own language if we want to continue working towards our mission of improving history education worldwide. 

For the first time since 2014, our team met, physically and in person, all in one place. Well, most of our team at least (some people couldn't make it). We booked a large historic (rather castle-like) building in Burgundy and enjoyed the beautiful medieval city of Noyers and its surroundings.

We enjoyed a fantastic guided tour of the ruins of Noyers Castle, visited the wine villages of Chablis and Tonnere, toured a proper French château, and observed the modern recreation of a medieval castle using medieval methods at Guédelon. Oh, and we had lots of good food, of course.

It was important for us to get the team together, as we all work remotely, spread across the globe. Meeting in person is different, and it really helps to grow the team spirit. The better we work together, the more efficiently we can publish our free encyclopedia, after all. 

As privacy regulations grow increasingly restrictive and Google decided to force all Google Analytics users to switch over to a newer version with inferior capabilities, we decided to build our own analytics solution. One that is:

• 100% privacy compliant

• able to cross-reference our encyclopedia data

• not controlled by third parties

• extremely fast and lightweight

And so we did. 2023 was the year when we switched our "source of truth" away from Google Analytics and chose to create our own metrics instead.

Throughout 2023, we worked hard to build a greener technology stack. Even though computing is generally not a highly polluting industry, it does consume a fair amount of electricity. While our own servers have a small carbon footprint, the online advertising ecosystem is a particularly polluting part of the internet. Whenever an ad is shown to a user, hundreds of requests are sent between different computers on the internet to check with advertisers how much they are willing to bid for that particular ad impression. This involves many companies, intermediaries, and AI... and it all has to happen within milliseconds. That's an energy-hungry process!

As a result, we started an initiative called supply path optimization (SPO), which means that we do what we can to reduce the amount of computing required to serve ads on the website. In 2023, we introduced a bid reduction algorithm that automatically removes bidders that are unlikely to yield results, before bids are sent. We are continuing this initiative in 2024 with further optimizations.

2023 was a productive year for book reviews. With the help of over 170 registered book reviewers, we published 84 reviews in total, ranging from academic monographs to historical fiction. We highly appreciate the work of our book reviewers, as these thoughtful reviews instigate necessary intellectual discourse among authors and readers. Book reviews help us reflect on the current state of scholarship and allow a wider audience better access to the most recent publications.

Our book reviews in 2023 have been quoted as editorial reviews by various established publishers, including Princeton University Press, Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Rowman & Littlefield, Yale University Press, and many others.