HN Companion◀︎ back | HN Companion home | new | best | ask | show | jobs
Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events (app.everything.diena.co)
40 points by lortex 4 hours ago | 21 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.

View on Hacker News


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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

works for me on Firefox 152. Lots of fun!

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.

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

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 !

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

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

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.

This is awesome

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.


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.

This is so cooooool

About|GitHub|Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News.