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Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

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Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#31

Post by GMoromisato »

lortex wrote: post #14
maxlin wrote: post #11

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.

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 !

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.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#37

Post by lortex »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #36

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#38

Post by lortex »

keynha wrote: post #32

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?

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.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#39

Post by tomthe »

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.

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