
Show HN: I parsed the entire en.wikipedia for events, time and location - nerf0
https://whataday.info
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nerf0
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.

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itsmeamario
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.

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nerf0
Thanks! Mind sharing what kind of project?

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itsmeamario
I'm trying to scan the whole Android Store.

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ASVVVAD
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

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nerf0
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.

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

Great job'

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nerf0
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.

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simon1573
Open Sourcing it would move the judgement of what is interesting or not from
you alone to the whole community.

