@Doc_James fyi

Thanks @Mrjohncummings This would be amazing :-) And many benefits beyond the COVID-19 outbreak.

@Yurik would you be able to explain what work would need to be done to make this happen?

Thanks very much @TheDJ :)

With the exception of the gear thing, its not obvious to me that any of this is not already possible (taking this from the point of view that its a feature request for graph extension, and not a support request. However from context i think its pretty clear its primarily the latter.)

Is this a task about Vega, the MediaWiki Graph extension, a template implementing the graph extension, or a specific invocation of a graph template?

In as much detail as you can, show us what you've tried and what it's not doing that you want it to do.

@Doc_James can you explain more to @Bawolff and @AntiCompositeNumber ? I'm unclear how many of these are feature requests for the software and how many are just writing new things in a template, I think this is probably a question for programmers.

Thanks

@Aklapper I'm unsure how to get this unstalled, what additional information is needed? I'm pretty confident me and James wont be able to say if the issues are coming from an extension, a template or something, we simply don't have the technical knowledge to asses this.

Agree with John I am not sure. I can describe what is wanted. I need someone with technical expertise to help determine how these things are carried out. With respect to the first one "Stretch the legend so it takes up about 80% of the width of the frame". How do we do that?

@Mrjohncummings: Speaking in technical terms, T248707#6007650 and T248707#6007601 wait for an answer.
However, if this task is a general support request (which would usually be out of scope for Phab as we usually don't track "Create content for a website" requests), then I guess the Maps and MediaWiki-extensions-Graph Phab tags could be removed, as the covid-19 Phab tag exists (hence that exception from "usually").

The task summary states "Improve functionality of mapping software". But there is no information and no proof that this is needed at all for the given bullet points.

In T248707#6007726, @Aklapper wrote:

@Mrjohncummings: Speaking in technical terms, T248707#6007650 and T248707#6007601 wait for an answer.
However, if this task is a general support request (which would usually be out of scope for Phab as we usually don't track "Create content for a website" requests), then I guess the Maps and MediaWiki-extensions-Graph Phab tags could be removed, as the covid-19 Phab tag exists (hence that exception from "usually").

The task summary states "Improve functionality of mapping software". But there is no information and no proof that this is needed at all for the given bullet points.

@Aklapper thanks, I'm sorry if the summary is incorrect, the bullet points are the things that are needed, please feel free to change the summary. I don't know who could answer T248707#6007650 and T248707#6007601 , me and James can't, who could we ask?

@Aklapper thanks, I'm sorry if the summary is incorrect, the bullet points are the things that are needed, please feel free to change the summary. I don't know who could answer T248707#6007650 and T248707#6007601 , me and James can't, who could we ask?

So normally phabricator is for stuff like: X is doing Y but i expect it to do Z (bug reports) and its impossible to X can we change it so i can do X (feature requests). Questions like "How do i do X" or "Is it possible to do X" normally are handled in other places like mw:Project:Support_desk, mw:extension_talk:Graph, WP:VPT, etc. (Not that you will likely get helpful answers there either since There are very limited number of people who understand vega. Not likely to get helpful answers here regardless since WMF disbanded the team working on graphs...)

I do think a complicating factor here is that vega is difficult to learn. Maybe this is egotistical, but im a professional programmer (albeit not in the data viz field) and i find it super confusing. I feel like its unreasonable to expect users to be able to deal with something i wouldnt want to deal with due to the level of complexity.

yeah, vega is a programming language masquerading as a graph definition language that can only be written in JSON. Compounding the issue is that our installation is a few major versions out of date, so the right documentation is hard to find.

Thanks @Bawolff and @AntiCompositeNumber I've added requests on Mediawiki Project:Support desk, Mediawiki Extension talk:Graph and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

If Vega is the thing that needs fixing, how could I found out who understands it and who could make the changes? Is there someone on WMF staff still who understands Vega or have they moved on?

A lot of us are working to address these issues. We will do so as quickly as possible. In the meantime, some clarification:

• Vega is capable of interactive graphs with a time component, like https://vega.github.io/vega/examples/global-development/. It is indeed complex and if you're not familiar with d3, it's more or less impossible. It is, however, a declarative version of d3 and therefore particularly well suited at writing templates for different types of charts. These could be maintained by a few people, if the graph extension was maintained (see below). Also, Vega Lite is a much simpler declarative language that might have broader use in custom chart making: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/
• The graph extension is 3 versions behind and templates of charts are not centralized. These are inter-related problems and we will fix the graph extension soon to unblock the situation
• The example of https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-million?year=65 is great. I think we should aim to have a world map graph template just like that, regardless of what we have to do with the graph extension or services behind it

@Milimetric thanks very much for your reply and to all who are working on this. If there's anything no technical I can help with please let me know, I write quite a lot of documentation if that's useful. @Doc_James can provide more info on what is needed if you want any clarifications.

Thanks again

@millimeter summed it up beautifully with " we should aim to have a world map graph template just like [OWID], regardless of what we have to do with the graph extension or services behind it"

These for example are amazing https://ourworldindata.org/policy-responses-covid

Just a comment so as not to forget ability to link data to Wikidata ;)