Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events
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.
Discussion Highlights (17 comments)
Jtarii
Instantly freezes the moment I try to interact with it on firefox.
0gs
yeah, borked on Chrome Android too. too bad, i want to see it!
Arslan1997
This is awesome
ss2f
Fantastic! Testing this on linux-gnome-firefox is smooth.
darkstarsys
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
maxlin
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.
maxlin
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.
maeril
This is so cooooool
UltraSane
Very nice, I would like a similar tool for analyzing system logs and metrics.
Frog1230
Works, its cool to look at but might there be a use case?
ks2048
You need some visual feedback that it's loading. I see a blank screen for 30 seconds.
Unearned5161
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
Events in the future are labelled in past tense. Rather than "happened in 4.5B" you could write "forecast in 4.5B"
UnfitFootprint
Really fun! Worked like a dream on iOS safari
aayushdutt
Can you share the data, the view can be improved a lot, it's not really capturing the essence.
TealMyEal
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
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?