Summary

• General: there was a lot of general interest in charts at Wikimania (the session was packed) and excitement about the fact that this project is prioritized and moving quickly. The prototype was very useful in communicating what will be different with charts compared to graphs, prompting the below feedback.
• Chart types: all the real-world examples of graphs shown by volunteers were some kind of line, bar, or pie chart that used one of the popular templates. There were also calls to support basic map visualizations (mostly choropleth maps), although everyone agreed the “basic” chart types were a higher priority.
• Commons: most volunteers agreed that centralizing charts in a place like Commons is a good idea. One specific concern was about how to properly reference source data when embedding a chart in an article. Another repeated concern was that having the charts live in Commons puts some editors outside the comfort zone of their home wiki.
• Data sources: a good number of volunteers wanted the ability to use Wikidata as a source for their charts. Only a few volunteers had previously used Commons tabular data, saying they used the CSV upload gadget because the JSON format was not easy to work with. Many of the real-world graph examples shown had very small datasets defined inline (especially for pie charts).
• Migration: volunteers expressed concern over the need to manually port hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of graphs that they created over the years. There were calls for some sort of automatic migration tool. Many asked specifically for backwards compatibility so that no migration would be needed at all.
• Interactivity: everyone was supportive of a server-first approach to displaying charts, but most people were expecting at least showing tooltips on hover. This is in line with the relatively simple interactivity that was available through the popular graph templates.
• Roadmap: everyone agreed the timelines were aggressive and that the priority should be to get to a production ready state as soon as possible, with new chart types and data sources coming later.

Action Items

• Continue working towards beta and production deployments as a priority.
• Focus on the “core” chart types before moving on to maps.
• Investigate the needs around referencing source data when pulling from Commons.
• Consider supporting data inline with the chart definition.
• Think through possible solutions to using Wikidata as a data source for charts.