Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

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

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.

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.

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?

Congrats on shipping :)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Really fun! Worked like a dream on iOS safari

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.

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

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

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

Very cool

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

This is awesome

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

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.

This is so cooooool

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