I'm expanding the scope of this bug to cover:
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Infographic_interactivity
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Java_applet_support
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Visualization_methods
And also https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Foundations_for_Interactive_Articles plus some other minor ones which got less attention/love and are linked from those (see also the category). Also adding to cc some of the people who took part in the discussions there, as the wiki is closed and I have no other way to do so.

Snippets:

• «Right now, I (User:Aude) could create a really awesome (featured picture quality) interactive infographic or map (e.g. with Ajax or Flash), but not have anyway to submit it to Wikimedia Commons and use in Wikipedia. We are currently limited to static images, video, or animated gifs (yuk!).» (SlippyMap extension is mentioned.)
• «Java applet is a powerful feature to illustrate mathematical, technical, electric and some other subjects, from interactive function graphs till mathematical models with advanced visualization. Unlike animations, they may have controls to interact with the user, allowing active experiments.»
• «Three-dimensional interactive visualization is an important special case. In molecular topics (e.g., chemistry, biochemistry and pharmaceuticals) and in geometry (e.g., in visualizing conic sections), the ability to rotate a complex object and see it from different sides can make the difference between understanding something and not. [...] Two-dimensional and three-dimensional plots of mathematical functions are another example.» (Suggested implementations from this proposal build upon EasyTimeline, <gallery>/slideshow, SmoothGallery...)

Keywords from the proposals: Flash, ActionScript, OpenLayers, OpenJDK from Sun, GNU Classpath from FSF and Harmony for Apache, Ultrastudio.org, JOGL, Prolog, Jython, Joyster, Cocoa, NASA World Wind, OpenGL, GChart, Silverlight, Gnash, CMOS, OpenLaszlo, Sugar, inline SVG, SVG editing, SVG animation, Proteopedia, Jmol, Advogato.

Obviously not high prio if nobody works on this...

Graph extension might be applicable, even though it is not dynamic (yet), or even in production wikis, it does support various timelines, e.g. "Napoleon" at http://trifacta.github.io/vega/editor/ :)

See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph and samples at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo

Discussion at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Graphs.2C_Maps.2C_..._.28experimental.29

Wikimedia will apply to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy on Tuesday, February 17. If you want this task to become a featured project idea, please follow these instructions.

There is also this >>> http://d3js.org/

T31242 (minus the "offsite" part) is the most plausible implementation for this, IMO.

Well, T31242 combined with T27854: provide the files via oEmbed and the use that in the articles to display interactive content in a safe way.

Once we update graph extension to vega 2.0, we can have interactive graphs.

Hey there,
I am interested in this project and was wondering if you'll would be open to have this as a project during the outreachy which is coming up (round 11)

In T45616#1662509, @TasneemLo wrote:

I am interested in this project and was wondering if you'll would be open to have this as a project during the outreachy which is coming up (round 11)

This is an extremely generic project, please pick one of its blockers or blockers thereof.

From the blocked tasks, only T3790 is a good candidate for Possible-Tech-Projects and it has already that tag. So I will simply remove the tag for this task to avoid future confusion.

@TasneemLo, thank you for your interest, please check whether T3790: Allow uploading of 3D files to Wikimedia Commons would be a good project for you and ask there any questions you might have.

Hi @Nemo_bis, @Qgil - thanks, I'll look into it

Java applets? Flash?!?

The "e.g." was meant to be read as "à la".