A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events
Details
- External ID
- 48950774
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events
- Website domain
- diena.co
- Launched
- July 17, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 118
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.937873357228196
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche data tools and novelty websites
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- zoomable timeline of wikipedia events
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Building a zoomable frontend timeline is approachable, but processing, parsing, and running graph-wide PageRank over 4 million Wikipedia/Wikidata entities and rendering multi-scale hierarchical levels of detail smoothly requires specialized data pipeline and visualization indexing.
What it would actually take: Stack requires a large-scale offline graph data pipeline (e.g., Spark or DuckDB with GraphX) to compute PageRank over Wikipedia links, followed by spatial/temporal tree indexing (like a 1D R-Tree or Quadtree variation) to dynamically cluster and level-of-detail cull millions of events for 60fps rendering in Kotlin Multiplatform / Skia.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Wikidata knowledge graph, Wikipedia geocoordinates visualization (theilemail.de/wikipage/)
Concerns raised: Date parsing errors (e.g., '20141221' parsed as year 20241221 instead of 2024), Page rank algorithm not useful for determining event significance, Data quality issues from automatic Wikipedia extraction, Trackpad/macbook touchpad controls feel strange, Scroll behavior counterintuitive (scroll zooms instead of scrolling)
Feature requests: Geographical/map view showing events by location coordinates, Scroll for vertical panning instead of zoom, Pinch to zoom support on macbook touchpad, Share/export dataset for improved visualization
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 18 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 19 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 258 days after the earliest competitor.
- Merge Wikipedia articles across languages into one page · hn · 2026-09-05 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- wikireader.koplugin · github · 2026-09-10 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- WikiCrawl · ph · 2026-09-28 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Temporal Context Map · hn · 2026-07-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Wikigraph · hn · 2026-06-02 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Channel Timeline Viewer · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- SubTrends · hn · 2026-08-03 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- FORMA — Animated data stories · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.