Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

https://app.everything.diena.co/

by lortex • 5 days ago

118 43 5 days ago

app.everything.diena.co

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.

Jtarii• 5 days ago

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

lortex9• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

works for me on Firefox 152. Lots of fun!

0gs• 5 days ago

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

lortex9• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

This is awesome

ss2f• 5 days ago

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

darkstarsys• 5 days 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• 5 days 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.

lortex9• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

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

maxlin2• 5 days 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.

lortex9• 5 days 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.

maxlin2• 5 days 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.

lortex9• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

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

GMoromisato• 5 days 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.

hobofan• 5 days ago

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

maeril• 5 days ago

This is so cooooool

UltraSane• 5 days ago

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

Frog1230• 5 days ago

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

The_Blade• 5 days ago

is having fun learning no longer a valid use case

ks2048• 5 days ago

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

Unearned5161• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

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

soupspaces• 5 days ago

Oh yeah and it doesn't even account for time dilation 5/7

UnfitFootprint• 5 days ago

Really fun! Worked like a dream on iOS safari

p0wn• 5 days ago

Very cool

aayushdutt• 5 days ago

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

TealMyEal• 5 days 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

keynha2• 5 days 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?

lortex9• 5 days 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.

keynha2• 4 days 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• 5 days 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.

lortex9• 5 days 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• 5 days 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• 5 days ago

Congrats on shipping :)

est• 5 days ago

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

willtemperley• 5 days 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?

lortex9• 3 days ago

Hi, thanks you're right, I have tested mouse and mobile browsing but missed trackpad usage. I'll update the behavior !

welcome_dragon• 3 days ago

I think you need to check these. I saw one item (a bank maybe?) that was started on "20141221" or something. Didn't get parsed so it is treated as the year 20241221, not 2024.

So many examples of this right off the bat. This needs some serious work/testing.

If you're going to use an LLM to code something, it is your responsibility to own, maintain, test, and understand that code

lortex9• 3 days ago

Hi, to be clear, this project is a view of the Wikidata knowledge graph. Some parts of Wikidata come from automatic extraction of Wikipedia articles and other sources, which I am not responsible of. For each event there is a link to Wikipedia and a link to Wikidata, the latter can be used to fix mistakes. I will import an updated dataset at some point.

Happy to integrate feedback on the UI part of this project, as I've started doing thanks to some of the other HN comments. I can assure you that this code was written by my hands, line by line, and that each bug is my own !

mrsalty• 3 days ago

Really nice! I always had in mind to build something similar but on the geographical axes: given a long/lat param show all historical events related in the surrounding area.

Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

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