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Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Multimedia and Commons/Improve graphs and interactive content

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Improve graphs and interactive content

Examples of Vega and Vega-Lite graphs we can build

  • Problem: Wikipedia would benefit from more animations, interactive content, and self-updating infographics
When we discuss historical changes, we should be able to view those changes interactively, e.g. side by side. Statistical data should be represented as easy to understand charts, and when the new data becomes available, those charts should update. We already have some of the tools for this (the <graph> tag, the shared data on commons, maps), but the current tools are hard to use, not maintained, and need improvements. The comprehensive vision was presented several years ago in a short I Dream of Content paper.
The Graph extension has many advantages for Wikimedia projects. In brief, it allows data to by displayed by generating graphs on-the-fly (we do not need a picture file anymore, and so we do not need to create a new picture each time the data are updated). However, the Graph extension is currently not widely used, probably partly because the code is not really user-friendly.

In addition, the current extension has not been able to display Wikidata data for more than a year, and since there is no official maintainer for this extension, the problem has remained ever since.

  • Who would benefit: Readers and content creators
  • Proposed solution: Upgrade the Vega library, add Vega-Lite support, and add multilingual support to Graphs.
Develop a GUI Visual-Editor-like tool to help contributors to create nice graphs. This tool could look a bit like those in spreadsheet software (the user selects the data to plot and the type of graph, then fine-tunes it). This tool could be integrated with the Data namespace on Wikimedia Commons (example) and with the Wikidata Query Service. The latter already offers different visualisation methods, with the ability to export results to several formats (html, json, svg). See this example. Adding customizable Vega code as an output would be nice.
Community Wishlist Survey 2016/Categories/Multimedia#Support SVG interactivity and animation in Media Viewer discussed making animation and interactivity easier for SVGs.
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