Feature Roadmap

Hello Everyone, We’re still waiting for the latest deployment to go live and expect to have the ‘Zooming in Further’ feature ready for testing sometime during the week. With not much else to talk about this week I felt it was a good time to share with you our current roadmap of feature development. The features listed here will most likely be deployed in the order shown spread out over the coming 6-8 months. All the best Sean

ZOOMING IN FURTHER & WIKIDATA INTEGRATION

More details on this feature are available in last week’s announcement: http://eepurl.com/Ohbkf

PRIORITY DISPLAY

This is a really cool feature; it will automatically hide less important events when the timeline gets over crowded. This means when you zoom out less important events will disappear as the timeline displays a larger time period. When you zoom back in events will re-appear as you focus on a more detailed moment in history. Priority Display will also let us create a timeline with every event in our database (over 1 million), creating the first version of the timeline of everything.

TIMELINE DIRECTORY

The directory is a major step towards our final vision. The first version we deploy won’t be perfect but will come with thousands of timelines imported directly from Wikipedia categories. So instead of searching for events and making your own timeline, you can search for an entire category and explore a whole topic. The contents of each timeline in the directory will be publicly editable so we can fine tune which events appear on the timeline.

CUSTOM EVENTS

Because not every historical event you might want to add to your timeline has its own Wikipedia article eventually the ability to create custom events is something that we must have. The new events can be linked to any Wikipedia article or the section of that article that is most relevant to the event. We also hope to use some of the incredible work being done by Wikidata to auto-create some of these custom events. For example we should be able to use Wikidata to create a sub-set of events for a person’s life simply based on the dates that Wikidata has linked to that article.