Show HN: Transform any Wikipedia article into a graphical timeline
observablehq.com
observablehq.com
When you are "zoomed out" do you get clumped eras like "Victorian" or "Age of Enlightenment"? Or since those are region-specific, does it just give you the regular spacing and boringness of "centuries"? Perhaps region does need to figure into the timeline so for the European belt you could still go with "Industrial Revolution" or "Edwardian" — that would overlap in areas with "Meiji" for Japan.
It also occurs to me that art had its own "eras" as well. Perhaps banding by geophysical location alone is rather limiting.
You ought to be able to zoom in of course and Wikipedia links to major wars (for example) appear — zoom in further and Wikipedia links to specific battles...
But then there are people as well: scientists, monarchs, explorers, artists....
The whole scale of the thing makes my head hurt. But if done "right" it would be, to me, the perfect interface to Wikipedia.
WWII example: https://conze.pt/explore/World%20War%20II?l=en&t=link-split&...
Works of Rembrandt (by inception date and their location): https://conze.pt/explore/Rembrandt?l=en&t=link-split&i=Q5598...
Showing cultural periods is still to be worked out, but already supported somewhat: https://conze.pt/explore/Victorian%20era?l=en&t=link-split&i...
> Love to see a timeline of world history.
Granted. You could start here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Centuries]
Alternately, start where you want. Warning: this will take a while.
> You ought to be able to zoom in
IMO history is so complicated, and timelines do not do justice to the nuances.
Being more familiar to us (as contemporaries), what about timelines of recent news? (Wikipedia current events [1], or even HN?). it helps to visualize the bigger picture for those who don't follow very close (which is healthier these days)
Beyond zooming, filtering will also help declutter the UI.
FYI There are already nice open-source timelines widgets like https://github.com/NUKnightLab/TimelineJS3 and http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/
return timeline.sort( ( a, b ) => b.unixTime - a.unixTime )Implementation seems a bit erratic, e.g. tried it on the Richard I page (Richard the Lionheart), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_England and get most random modern dates of research articles, and virtually none of the basic dates of his life (birth death, etc).
Confirmation bias for me is: the software doesn't understand anything so the summary (or transformation) is nonsensical.