Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

(everything.diena.co)

73 points | by lortex 10 hours ago

20 comments

  • keynha 42 minutes 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?
  • TealMyEal 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.
  • darkstarsys 8 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 8 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 8 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 5 hours ago
    Events in the future are labelled in past tense. Rather than "happened in 4.5B" you could write "forecast in 4.5B"
  • UnfitFootprint 2 hours ago
    Really fun! Worked like a dream on iOS safari
  • 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.
  • p0wn 1 hour ago
    Very cool
  • maxlin 8 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 8 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 !
      • GMoromisato 57 minutes 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>

      • jcbe 1 hour ago
        +1, I noticed and fixed a few erroneous dates that would have presumably been difficult to surface otherwise
    • hobofan 6 hours ago
      Almost everything further than a few years in the future and a few predicted pangea events appear to be data errors.
  • Frog1230 7 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
  • Jtarii 9 hours ago
    Instantly freezes the moment I try to interact with it on firefox.
    • lortex 9 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 ([email protected]) the error message that appears in the console.
      • HikesALot 7 hours ago
        works for me on Firefox 152. Lots of fun!
  • ss2f 8 hours ago
    Fantastic! Testing this on linux-gnome-firefox is smooth.
  • UltraSane 7 hours ago
    Very nice, I would like a similar tool for analyzing system logs and metrics.
  • 0gs 9 hours ago
    yeah, borked on Chrome Android too. too bad, i want to see it!
    • lortex 9 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.
  • Arslan1997 9 hours ago
    This is awesome
  • maxlin 8 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 8 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 8 hours ago
    This is so cooooool
  • lightthemad 24 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • dezzayn-com 3 hours ago
    [flagged]