Show HN: I parsed the entire en.wikipedia for events, time and location | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I parsed the entire en.wikipedia for events, time and location

whataday.info

18 pointsnerf09 comments

Hi HN,

When browsing wikipedia, sometimes I find myself asking the question, "when this was happening, what else happened around the same time/location?" After debating whether this was actually useful and researching how it could be implemented, I finally set out to build this tool that allows you to browse and search (almost) all dated events on en.wikipedia. Given an event, it also shows you what was happening closeby, in spacetime.

I don't know how people will use it. I don't even know if anyone will find this useful. But I enjoyed building it.

wow, really nice IMO. I'd be interested in seeing the spider and crawlers to do this, as it's something similar to other project I want to do.

Thanks! Mind sharing what kind of project?

I'm trying to scan the whole Android Store.

I think this is pretty cool! One suggestion is making it easier to search by date. I was able to figure it out by clicking a link but if it was possible to select from a calendar or type in a date and get all events that would make it more friendly :3

Thanks! Yup I need to spend more time on it. I had a hard time finding an intuitive calendar UI that works on both desktop and mobile, and finally settled on just relying on search. But I did have a hunch that it's not good enough.

Very cool! Do you plan to open source it? I'm curious what it looks like :)

Great job'

Thanks! No plan at the moment. The frontend is not very interesting. The backend is basically a "giant" database with all the events. I think the interesting part would be the way I collected the events, with a language model.

Open Sourcing it would move the judgement of what is interesting or not from you alone to the whole community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com