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Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

25 points by lortex 3 hours ago | 14 comments

I'm building a journal app in Kotlin Multiplatform and for this purpose I have created a zoomable timeline interface.

This is a side-project where I reuse the timeline interface to display 4 million events imported from Wikipedia / Wikidata, scored using PageRank. There is more information on the about page.

If you're interested in the stack: I use Kotlin Multiplatform extensively, with Compose Multiplatform for the UI, communicates with the backend using Kotlinx-RPC and behind the hood a simple Postgres database on a Hetzner machine.

darkstarsys 38 minutes 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 25 minutes 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 33 minutes 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.

ss2f 43 minutes ago

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

Jtarii 2 hours ago

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

lortex 2 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.

maxlin 29 minutes 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 21 minutes 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 !

maeril 11 minutes ago

This is so cooooool

maxlin 36 minutes 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 27 minutes 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.

Arslan1997 2 hours ago

This is awesome

0gs 2 hours ago

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

lortex 2 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.