Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events(app.everything.diena.co)

39 pointsby lortex4 hours ago12 comments

Unearned516115 minutes 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.
ks204825 minutes ago
You need some visual feedback that it's loading. I see a blank screen for 30 seconds.
Frog1230an hour ago
Works, its cool to look at but might there be a use case?
darkstarsys2 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
- popalchemist8 minutes ago
  This is well done. How did you source and categorize the data points?
- lortex2 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.
- stvltvs2 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.
ss2f2 hours ago
Fantastic! Testing this on linux-gnome-firefox is smooth.
Jtarii3 hours ago
Instantly freezes the moment I try to interact with it on firefox.
- lortex3 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.
  - HikesALotan hour ago
    works for me on Firefox 152. Lots of fun!
UltraSanean hour ago
Very nice, I would like a similar tool for analyzing system logs and metrics.
0gs3 hours ago
yeah, borked on Chrome Android too. too bad, i want to see it!
- lortex3 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.
Arslan19972 hours ago
This is awesome
maxlin2 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.
- lortex2 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 !
maxlin2 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.
- lortex2 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.
maeril2 hours ago
This is so cooooool