Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

108 points by lortex a day ago on hackernews | 39 comments

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

[OP] lortex | a day 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 | a day ago
works for me on Firefox 152. Lots of fun!

0gs | a day ago

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

: [OP] lortex | a day 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.

Arslan1997 | a day ago

This is awesome

ss2f | a day ago

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

darkstarsys | a day 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

: stvltvs | a day 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.
: [OP] lortex | a day 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.
: popalchemist | a day ago
This is well done. How did you source and categorize the data points?

maxlin | a day 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.

: [OP] lortex | a day 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.

maxlin | a day 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.

[OP] lortex | a day 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 | 18 hours ago
+1, I noticed and fixed a few erroneous dates that would have presumably been difficult to surface otherwise
: GMoromisato | 18 hours ago
The problem is that there's no guarantee that extraction errors will always end up as outliers. Instead, outliers are merely the errors that are easiest to find.
<Insert bullet-ridden bomber image here>

hobofan | a day ago

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

maeril | a day ago

This is so cooooool

UltraSane | a day ago

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

Frog1230 | a day ago

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

: The_Blade | 23 hours ago
is having fun learning no longer a valid use case

ks2048 | a day ago

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

Unearned5161 | a day 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.

kingo55 | 22 hours ago

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

: soupspaces | 15 hours ago
Oh yeah and it doesn't even account for time dilation 5/7

UnfitFootprint | 20 hours ago

Really fun! Worked like a dream on iOS safari

p0wn | 19 hours ago

Very cool

aayushdutt | 19 hours ago

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

TealMyEal | 19 hours 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

keynha | 18 hours ago

This is really nicely done, the log zoom makes 4M events feel navigable instead of like a wall. How are you serving a viewport at that scale: precomputed levels of detail, or a query against the raw events on each pan and zoom?

[OP] lortex | 13 hours ago

Thank you ! It's indeed precomputed levels of detail, the backend serves a key-value store: for each bucket a top 10 events that start or end in this bucket. A bucket is described by its zoom level (from 1 day to 2^34 days) and time coordinates.

: keynha | 3 hours ago
Makes sense, thanks. The fixed 10-per-bucket cap is what keeps every viewport the same size no matter the zoom, that's the elegant bit.

tweetle_beetle | 14 hours ago

Not sure the page rank style algorithm is that useful from my limited browsing. Apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellie%27s_Castle is the most significant entry in human history.

: [OP] lortex | 13 hours ago
It is quite strange indeed, it's probably a bug in the visualization because in my database I see that Kellie's Castle has a low rank.

tomthe | 13 hours ago

Cool! I made something similar with the same datasets a year ago, but with geocoordinates instead of timestamps: https://theilemail.de/wikipage/ It shows a zoomable map with the "most important" wikipedia entries at specific locations.

It was very hard to get the parameters right so that the text is always displayed in a good size, while showing not too few or too many entries. I never published it until now, I think.

Morhaus | 12 hours ago

Congrats on shipping :)

est | 12 hours ago

It feels a little strange on macbook touchpad, otherwise it's a cool project

: willtemperley | 11 hours ago
Also on a macbook, it took me a while to realise pinch to zoom doesn't do anything except zoom the page, pan is click and drag, and scroll is zoom. Cool project except for the controls, surely scroll should be to scroll up and down?