Are there any public APIs with databases of historical facts?
api, resources, web-services, wikipedia
Solution
The closest thing is Wikipedia. The answer is No.
EDIT: These are a few I have found since asking this question:
http://thebigdb.com/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page
EDIT2: http://gdeltproject.org/ - Global Database Of Events
Problem
The most common source of free historical information is Wikipedia, but I am missing an API that could be used to e.g. query all things that happened on January 23rd 2010. Some iPhone apps have databases behind (www.historysurferapp.com comes to mind, but also a ton of "what happened today" apps") but they seem home-grown and/or wikipedia-based. Anyone knows if there is such a public "timeline of everything" database somewhere?