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Comment by adaml_623 | Hacker News Reader

I think this map highlights some fundamental flaw with wikipedia or what we highlight in history or something similar to this.

Or possibly it's a perfect example of what is wrong with summarising a complicated entity. I hope in the future that people will move away from the Top Ten things about X or the 5 things you need to know about Y.

This map is ignorance presenting as a summary.

(Yes I know it's meant to be a cute map)

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Seems to me that your second idea is probably pretty accurate. History books (general purpose ones, that is) cover wars extensively. On the one hand, wars cause rapid and massive political and social changes, so they are obviously very important to understanding history. But at the same time, understanding what caused a war, what the political and social aftermath looked like, and the cultural perceptions of the war are also extremely important. Not to mention all the non-war history. So there is probably a good argument that history books focus too heavily on wars. So it is not surprising that Wikipedia would also focus heavily (perhaps too heavily) on wars.

> But at the same time, understanding what caused a war, what the political and social aftermath looked like, and the cultural perceptions of the war are also extremely important.

And those paragraphs will contain the word "war" many times.

I suspect if you had lived though a significant war you would probably think history was overly focused on social changes and should spend more time on technology and tactics.

Even the people who lived through actual battles (where technology and tactics would be relevant) tend to tell stories that are mostly about hunger, deprivation and being cold. Shooting people and executing strategic plans hardly ever figure in them.

And this makes sense: most soldiers spend most of their time waiting around for battles or marching from one battle to the next. The actual battles themselves take up very little of their time (even if they're extremely stressful).

The stories of those that lived through wars as civilians (the vast majority of people) of course never talk about technology and tactics as they had nothing to do with them.

War is often vary 'hands on' for at least one civilian population. Did William Tecumseh Sherman decide to burn your barn? Well now you care about tactics.

But you're still not likely to tell stories of the battlefield tactics and grand strategy that led to the burning of your barn, but rather than deprivation and hardship that not having that barn caused.

I guess there's a few reasons why. A big reason for learning history is learning from exceptional events, and wars are exceptional. Learning how to avoid them (if possible) and win them (if necessary) isn't something you want each generation to learn by trial and error.

Also, wars are kind of interesting. A good guy (us) and bad guy (them) is a fail-proof way to make a story mildly interesting.

I guess there's other lessons we should learn from history (as opposed to trial and error, or observation). Political systems are a good one - there's things we could learn from the Greeks which could apply today (like sortition, as a way to stop career politicians getting too powerful, but still giving the decision makers enough power that they have an incentive to properly study the issue). We could also learn about dealing with natural disasters, resource exploitation, and the history of moral panics.

>"Also, wars are kind of interesting. A good guy (us) and bad guy (them) is a fail-proof way to make a story mildly interesting."

And the good guys always win! (or the winners are the ones who are left to call themselves the good guys)

It'd probably be better if it used a better measure than raw term frequency in the articles. For example, most of Europe is "War". If it used something like inverse document frequency (tf-idf) to rank the terms, it might get more distinct words for each country.

That sounds like a great idea. I hope the original poster picks up on your idea. Although that may still leave some of the offensive terms listed elsewhere in the comments (Kuwait <- Iraq, Ethiopia <- Eritrea)

That might be so if your goal is to hilight what sets the countries apart.

The author of the map chose for 'history of __' as the topic. And when doing that with countries it is not surprising to find that countries are defined by war, nobility, imperialism and rivalry.

We like to think countries are formed because of their people, and their culture, but in reality countries are formed because of their resources, defendability and their interested parties.

If there is one thing that defines borders in europe, it is war, and this map shows that quite laconically :)

I was hoping for more words when you zoomed, like a hierarchical wordle, but I realise that that was not the purpose of the map. Interesting way to get students thinking about history.

Yeah, I'd be interested in doing an associative version of this (sort of like what we did for this[1]), though my mapping skills are not quite up to the author's/

[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-peopl...

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