Local historian Jim Vrabel has a vision for a crowd sourced history of Boston that tells the whole story of the city.

His new website, WhenAndWhereInBoston.org, is a sweeping, searchable and explorable database of Boston history that Vrabel calls “an all Boston Wiki,” designed to gather, preserve and present the events, places and people who have shaped the city.

And no detail is too insignificant to be left out.

“Too often we just think that the history of Boston started and stopped with the Revolutionary War. Well, it didn’t,” Vrabel said in an interview. “So I decided to put all the material I had gathered into this website and invite other people to do so as well.”

The result is an open access platform that allows users to search, explore and contribute historical facts, each one vetted by a panel of local historians before being presented on the website as a straightforward paragraph accompanying a pin on a map and attributed to a source.

Vrabel previously worked as an historical author, a newspaper journalist and for 25 years in the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services under the administrations of Mayors Raymond Flynn and Thomas Menino.

He said that the idea for the website grew from a realization that books alone no longer meet the needs of modern history seekers.

In modernity, much of the public’s casual consumption of history is now filtered through artificial intelligence assisted search engines, creating a version of history that is only as complete as our virtual documentation of it.

Contributions to WhenAndWhereInBoston already include overlooked histories like that of a United Service Organizations (USO) post, facilities that provided support and extracurriculars to U.S. servicemen, built on Boston Common in the 1940s that excluded Black service-members.

“Just before we launched, one of the people on the editorial committee, [Lynn Johnson], wrote an op-ed on a USO post that was built on Boston Common in the ‘40s that wasn’t very kind toward Black people,” Vrabel said. “I’d never heard of it and I’m sure most Bostonians never heard of it, and it was [history] in danger of being lost.”

Though the website currently reflects much of Vrabel’s professional historical encyclopedia, drawn from his previous works including books When in Boston: A Timeline & Almanac and A People’s History of the New Boston, he hopes the project is only just beginning.

The site, which is run as a nonprofit, was built thanks to an anonymous donor. While Vrabel and his team are exploring long-term funding options, including potentially partnering with a nonprofit institution or local university, he is committed to keeping the platform free of advertising and focused solely on the facts.

The West End Museum hosted a kickoff event for the site and Vrabel hopes to build deeper partnerships with local institutions as the site grows. “They want to add West End history to it, just like very neighborhood wants to see themselves represented,” he said.

Recent federal funding cuts tied to the Trump administration's efforts to “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” have cut short the West End Museum’s efforts to research a lesser-known history of LGBTQ activism in the West End.

Vrabel’s vision for his website is simple, to create a place where Boston’s full story can be told. “History should be written by everybody, winners or losers,” he said. “If it happened, it’s history. So, this is the place to go to find it out, and to put it in.”