diff --git a/date_selection.py b/date_selection.py
index d180e51936fbf3500e5bfc2f9837dfdbabfef20e..f5db4631032e8a472d3eb6a087954f590d992e8f 100644
--- a/date_selection.py
+++ b/date_selection.py
@@ -1,8 +1,7 @@
 from collections import Counter
-from datetime import datetime
-import random
 
 import igraph
+import numpy as np
 
 import util
 
@@ -17,7 +16,7 @@ def rank_dates_by_mention_count(articles, start_date, end_date):
     return [item[0] for item in mention_count.most_common()]
 
 
-def rank_dates_by_wilson(articles, start_date, end_date):
+def rank_dates_by_wilson(articles, start_date, end_date, num_dates):
     # count how often each published -> mentioned pair occurs
     pub_to_mention_count = Counter({})
     for article in articles:
@@ -30,18 +29,24 @@ def rank_dates_by_wilson(articles, start_date, end_date):
     # the edge weight for each published -> mentioned pair is (occurrence count) * (temporal distance between the dates)
     edges = []
     for pub_date, mentioned_date in pub_to_mention_count.keys():
-        date_diff = (datetime.strptime(pub_date, '%Y-%m-%d') - datetime.strptime(mentioned_date, '%Y-%m-%d')).days
-        edge_weight = pub_to_mention_count[(pub_date, mentioned_date)] * abs(date_diff)
+        date_diff = util.days_between(mentioned_date, pub_date)
+        edge_weight = pub_to_mention_count[(pub_date, mentioned_date)] * date_diff
         edges.append((pub_date, mentioned_date, edge_weight))
 
     # create a graph from the edge list
     g = igraph.Graph.TupleList(edges, directed=True, edge_attrs='weight')
     vertex_names = g.vs['name']
 
-    # igraph.plot(g, layout='kk', vertex_label=g.vs['name'], bbox=(3000, 3000))
-
     # rank vertices by pagerank score
     pagerank_scores = g.pagerank(directed=True, weights=g.es['weight'])
     ranked_dates = util.rank(vertex_names, scores=pagerank_scores)
 
+    print(date_uniformity(ranked_dates[:num_dates]))
+
     return ranked_dates
+
+
+def date_uniformity(dates):
+    dates.sort()
+    date_diffs = [util.days_between(dates[i], dates[i + 1]) for i in range(len(dates) - 1)]
+    return np.std(date_diffs)
diff --git a/timeline_generation.py b/timeline_generation.py
index f5a8c2367c5d703c67ead7ca11b4d7410b0c1b73..9e6919a2f85887099730bfd4bfa4e1d7b0be365a 100644
--- a/timeline_generation.py
+++ b/timeline_generation.py
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ def make_timeline(articles, gold_timeline, keywords):
     # articles = dataset.filter_articles_by_keywords(articles, keywords)
 
     # select dates
-    ranked_dates = date_selection.rank_dates_by_wilson(articles, start_date, end_date)
+    ranked_dates = date_selection.rank_dates_by_wilson(articles, start_date, end_date, num_dates)
 
     # train TFIDF vectorizer on all sentences (not just the ones for this date)
     all_sentences = [sentence['text'] for article in articles for sentence in article['sentences']]
diff --git a/util.py b/util.py
index 3ba515bafeab2d74126387138e3f4f507437e2b9..b2af4465b64438e140f4079bde8a8177b117bb32 100644
--- a/util.py
+++ b/util.py
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 import os
+from datetime import datetime
 
 
 def subdirs(path):
@@ -23,3 +24,8 @@ def rank(lst, scores):
     """
     sorted_indices = sorted(list(range(len(scores))), key=lambda i: scores[i], reverse=True)
     return [lst[i] for i in sorted_indices]
+
+
+def days_between(date1, date2):
+    return abs((datetime.strptime(date1, '%Y-%m-%d') - datetime.strptime(date2, '%Y-%m-%d')).days)
+