I think a lot of confusion around Graph comes from the fact that it tries to serve two very different use cases:

• Visualizations based on structured sequential data (as opposed to Wikidata which is structured key-value data). You put the numbers in a data table on Commons, Graph pulls in the data and renders a chart or map. This allows for data sharing across wikis, machine-readability and writeability, separation of article maintenance and data updates etc. etc. It would basically bring the advantages of Wikidata to another domain of data.
• Rich interactive content - maps or diagrams where you can zoom in, animations explaining how machines work, whatever.

As far as I can tell, neither of these had any appreciable uptake. Most graphs don't use external data and just dump it into the wikitext; most graphs don't include a meaningful level of interactivity, and are very basic data visualizations like bar charts or pie charts. The future of the extension is in doubt because of technical issues (although of course the lack of adoption influences how much effort is spent attempting to fix those technical issues), but its failure at adoption is because of product issues. Using it is just not intuitive enough and not well explained; using it in a non-trivial way (such as actually providing rich media), even more so.

So I think the key question is not what's technically possible (or cool from a hacker's point of view) but what would editors be actually willing to use?

(Somewhat related to that: T248897: Create an easy-to-use editing interface for JSON tabular data pages)

In T336632#8861465, @Tgr wrote:

I think a lot of confusion around Graph comes from the fact that it tries to serve two very different use cases:

• Visualizations based on structured sequential data (as opposed to Wikidata which is structured key-value data). You put the numbers in a data table on Commons, Graph pulls in the data and renders a chart or map. This allows for data sharing across wikis, machine-readability and writeability, separation of article maintenance and data updates etc. etc. It would basically bring the advantages of Wikidata to another domain of data.
• Rich interactive content - maps or diagrams where you can zoom in, animations explaining how machines work, whatever.

As far as I can tell, neither of these had any appreciable uptake. Most graphs don't use external data and just dump it into the wikitext; most graphs don't include a meaningful level of interactivity, and are very basic data visualizations like bar charts or pie charts. The future of the extension is in doubt because of technical issues (although of course the lack of adoption influences how much effort is spent attempting to fix those technical issues), but its failure at adoption is because of product issues. Using it is just not intuitive enough and not well explained; using it in a non-trivial way (such as actually providing rich media), even more so.

So I think the key question is not what's technically possible (or cool from a hacker's point of view) but what would editors be actually willing to use?

I agree 100%. I still think its useful to experiment towards demos as its hard to talk to users without demos, but the big thing is figuring out what would work, not making it work.

(Just for context, i was planning to experiment with this sort of thing even before the graph kerfuffle, because it really seems like graph has not lived up to its potential)

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