Terms of use and content licences

Last updated: 3 October 2026

Using this site

A Day in the Past is a free educational website. You’re welcome to use it at home and in school, and to print our worksheets for your class or family. We work hard to get things right, but history sources sometimes disagree and mistakes can happen, so the site is provided “as is” without any guarantee. If you find an error, please email us and we’ll put it right.

Text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Many entries come from Wikipedia’s “On this day” lists, which we load through the Wikimedia REST API. Where an entry has not been rewritten by us, it shows Wikipedia’s own wording. That text was written by Wikipedia contributors and is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). We credit it in three ways:

• every day page says which Wikipedia date page its entries come from, with a link to it and to the licence;
• each entry has a “Read more” or “Find out more” link to the Wikipedia article it is based on, where the full list of authors can be found in the page history;
• this page explains the licence.

Our shortened titles for those entries are adaptations of the Wikipedia text and are shared under the same licence. If you reuse any Wikipedia text from this site, you must credit Wikipedia and share your version under the same licence — see Wikipedia: Reusing Wikipedia content. Wikipedia’s own rules are in the Wikimedia Terms of Use.

To pick which famous birthdays and anniversaries to show first, we use counts of how many language editions of Wikipedia have an article about each subject, taken from Wikidata (whose data is in the public domain under CC0).

Our own writing

The child-friendly stories (the entries with a heading and a short write-up), page text and worksheets are written by A Day in the Past. Facts in them are checked against the linked sources.

Photos

Photos come from Wikimedia Commons and other openly licensed collections. Each one is used under its own licence (such as public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA), and the photographer or source and the licence are shown next to the picture and on our photo credits page. Any photos uploaded by the site owner are our own or used with permission.

Videos

Videos belong to the channels that published them (for example museums, broadcasters and space agencies) and are shown using YouTube’s standard player. They only load when you press play.

Links to other websites

We link to other websites so you can find out more. We choose them carefully, but we don’t control them and aren’t responsible for what they contain. Some, like Wikipedia, are written for adults.

Changes

We may update these terms from time to time; the date at the top shows when they last changed.