Epoch
Create a fictional character and see history through their eyes: a personal Wikipedia-sourced timeline of every real event they would have lived through.
About
Give it a name, a birth year, a death year and a place, and it queries the Wikipedia API to build a collapsible timeline of the real historical events that person would have lived through. A significance-ranking pipeline scores events using Wikidata sitelink counts, entity-type detection, named-event prefixes and link density, while aggressive filtering strips sports results, malformed markup, and citation fragments, and a 24-hour TTL cache with batched requests respects Wikipedia rate limits without stalling the UI. The two-level decade-to-year-to-event timeline highlights milestones and generates an "oral history" of the stories that were current when the character was 15. Deployed to Vercel; a Vitest suite covers the event-filtering pipeline.
Highlights
- Significance-ranking pipeline scores events using Wikidata sitelink counts, entity-type detection, named-event prefixes, and link density.
- Aggressive content filtering strips sports results, malformed markup, and citation fragments before events are shown.
- 24-hour TTL API cache with batched requests respects Wikipedia rate limits without stalling the UI.
- Two-level collapsible decade→year→event timeline with milestone highlighting and generated "oral history" (stories heard at age 15).
- Deployed to Vercel; has a Vitest test suite for the event-filtering pipeline.
By the numbers
- Commits
- 58
- Lines added
- +781
- Lines removed
- −8
- Source files
- 3,278