Still Teaching After A Millennium Screensaver
The Still Teaching After A Millennium screensaver shows the oldest universities still operating, queried live against Wikidata in SPARQL. Reading down the list is a fair map of where scholarship was institutionalised first, and it is not the map most curricula imply. Two caveats: the class is whatever Wikidata types as a university, so a monastic foundation that later grew a faculty can appear beside a civic one, and inception dates this old are contested by centuries. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
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How the Still Teaching After A Millennium screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
The oldest universities still operating, queried live against Wikidata in SPARQL. Reading down the list is a fair map of where scholarship was institutionalised first, and it is not the map most curricula imply. Two caveats: the class is whatever Wikidata types as a university, so a monastic foundation that later grew a faculty can appear beside a civic one, and inception dates this old are contested by centuries.
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Dating the oldest universities with Wikidata
Wikidata is the structured-data project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Items there have properties, such as an inception date, a country or an instance-of class, and the Wikidata Query Service lets anyone ask questions of them in SPARQL, a query language for RDF graph data standardised by the W3C. This saver puts one such question to it: which institutions typed as universities have the earliest inception dates?
The answer depends heavily on definitions. Wikipedia's list of the oldest universities in continuous operation uses a narrow meaning, institutions with the structural and legal features that developed in medieval Europe, and puts Bologna first. Teaching there is dated to around 1088, but the list gives 1180 to 1190 for when it was recognised as a university. Oxford is dated to 1096 for its earliest classes, and 1200 to 1214 for its organisation. The University of Paris dates from around 1200 but was abolished in 1793, and the modern University of Paris dates from 1896.
Institutions such as al-Qarawiyyin (859), founded as a mosque and later developing a madrasa, are left out of that list, so whether an older date counts is a matter of historical judgement. An entry in Wikidata also only appears if a volunteer has added an inception date and a suitable class, so missing or disputed dates change what ranks where. It is a map of how the data was recorded, as much as of how scholarship began.
A worked example
The oldest universities still operating, queried live against Wikidata in SPARQL. Reading down the list is a fair map of where scholarship was institutionalised first, and it is not the map most curricula imply. Two caveats: the class is whatever Wikidata types as a university, so a monastic foundation that later grew a faculty can appear beside a civic one, and inception dates this old are contested by centuries.
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Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes, and it runs entirely in your browser.
- Why do different lists disagree about the oldest university?
- The criteria vary: continuous operation, university status in the medieval European sense, or the date teaching first began. Bologna's teaching is dated to around 1088 but its recognition as a university to the late twelfth century.
- What is SPARQL?
- It is the W3C query language for RDF data, standardised as SPARQL 1.1 in 2013. Queries describe patterns of relationships, and the service returns every item that fits them.