Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

66 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by lortex

28 Comments

TealMyEal

20 minutes ago

its a very promising idea, i recently god into the Bronze age collapse and this was a nice way to look around at other events happening at that time and put context to it. a few bugs to iron out but yeah good work

aayushdutt

32 minutes ago

Can you share the data, the view can be improved a lot, it's not really capturing the essence.

ks2048

6 hours ago

You need some visual feedback that it's loading. I see a blank screen for 30 seconds.

UnfitFootprint

2 hours ago

Really fun! Worked like a dream on iOS safari

darkstarsys

7 hours ago

See also my log-scale timeline of the universe — hand-curated rather than a giant import, and I hope also a bit nicer/simpler UI: https://deep-timeline.org

lortex

7 hours ago

Thank you for sharing your project, it must have been quite some work to curate the events. My plan is to at some point be able to implement various filters so that people can make usable timelines. Right now it's more of a tech demo.

stvltvs

7 hours ago

Nice! I can't help thinking it would be informative to see it on a linear scale. Vast, unfathomable stretches of time before humans come on the scene, and then human history is a blip at the end.

popalchemist

6 hours ago

This is well done. How did you source and categorize the data points?

kingo55

4 hours ago

Events in the future are labelled in past tense. Rather than "happened in 4.5B" you could write "forecast in 4.5B"

p0wn

an hour ago

Very cool

Unearned5161

6 hours ago

Thank you for making this, it's very nice. I love a good timeline, everything seems to make a bit more sense when it's laid out spatially.

Frog1230

6 hours ago

Works, its cool to look at but might there be a use case?

The_Blade

5 hours ago

is having fun learning no longer a valid use case

ss2f

8 hours ago

Fantastic! Testing this on linux-gnome-firefox is smooth.

Jtarii

8 hours ago

Instantly freezes the moment I try to interact with it on firefox.

lortex

8 hours ago

Hi, thank you for giving it a try ! I test both on Firefox (152) and Chrome, mobile and desktop. If you don't mind please send me (lucas@pluvina.ge) the error message that appears in the console.

HikesALot

7 hours ago

works for me on Firefox 152. Lots of fun!

UltraSane

6 hours ago

Very nice, I would like a similar tool for analyzing system logs and metrics.

maxlin

7 hours ago

An arbitrary data error I found is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jekadefari is shown on the year 760251. That number is obviously wrong, it instead appears to be the postcode of the place.

lortex

7 hours ago

Wikidata is the source I used to get metadata about Wikipedia articles. Sometimes the data is automatically extracted from Wikipedia articles which introduces these errors. What's nice is that the timeline representation easily shows these outliers and will help us fix them !

jcbe

4 minutes ago

+1, I noticed and fixed a few erroneous dates that would have presumably been difficult to surface otherwise

hobofan

5 hours ago

Almost everything further than a few years in the future and a few predicted pangea events appear to be data errors.

0gs

8 hours ago

yeah, borked on Chrome Android too. too bad, i want to see it!

lortex

8 hours ago

Hi, I'm sorry for that, my backend is struggling a bit I didn't expect to be on the front page so soon. On https://www.diena.co/everything/ there is a page with a video if you want to see how it looks and behaves.

maxlin

7 hours ago

Cool, though I assume there's some accuracy shortfalls, when not close to zero the UI breaks when years are ~1 pixel in size.

Probably doesn't matter for much of the content, though immediately comes to mind that for after big bang there is "known events" that happened at second-scale. Don't know if there's exact Wikipeida articles of those, but with an appropriately accurate timestamp storage & handling (128bit? more?), one could well zoom in to those if they did exist.

lortex

7 hours ago

Yes indeed, I'll fix them at some point ! For in-between events it doesn't really matter to be able to zoom in, but it'd be great to explore the birth of the universe on this timeline. Storage wise it's already supporting such precision, but the UI (which was made for the 1900-2100 range initially) still has issues.

maeril

7 hours ago

This is so cooooool