1. Is there interest in pushing this as a GSoC/Outreachy project?

2. Is anyone willing to mentor?

This is a message posted to all tasks under "Re-check in September 2015" at Possible-Tech-Projects. Outreachy-Round-11 is around the corner. If you want to propose this task as a featured project idea, we need a clear plan with community support, and two mentors willing to support it.

This is a message sent to all Possible-Tech-Projects. The new round of Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grants is open until 29 Sep. For the first time, technical projects are within scope, thanks to the feedback received at Wikimania 2015, before, and after (T105414). If someone is interested in obtaining funds to push this task, this might be a good way.

Can the <graph> extension be used to draw these? https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo

In T56222#1893612, @Yurik wrote:

Can the <graph> extension be used to draw these? https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo

The reality is that you still are the only person in Wikimedia wikis able to use this extension, as far as I can tell. To kickstart the usage of the extension and make people understand what it can be used for, you could/should propose some rewritten templates for the known use cases. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cladogram ? It has over 400 usages and could increase the usage of your extension by an order of magnitude or two, if made easier to use.

Then you can move to bigger use cases, from the category https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Genealogy_formatting_templates

@Nemo_bis, this is not exactly true. Actually I feel there are people who know Vega syntax far better than I do, like @Milimetric, or the authors of GraphChart, GraphMap, or this Pie chart. And don't forget that huwiki that auto-generates 20,000+ simple graphs from Wikidata with Lua.

I would love to write all these templates myself, but I suspect I won't get too far without help. There are many Vega examples already, and if I add more, it won't teach others how to do it. I think it would be much better if I spent more time improving Vega itself (e.g. graph debugging support), and other projects like maps, extension storage, support for new content types, etc, that not as many people are working on.

P.S. There is one big <graph> limitation that we should be aware of -- <graph> is really a static image, which means that links are not easily supported, unless we introduce some click map on top of it. Interactive graphs do not solve it because they have to be loaded first. Big TBD.

In T56222#1894739, @Yurik wrote:

@Nemo_bis, this is not exactly true. Actually I feel there are people who know Vega syntax far better than I do, like @Milimetric

My perspective might be interesting here. I don't know Vega by heart or anything fancy like that. What I learned is that you can learn to build a specific Vega graph in about 2 hours. Once you learn it once, that time comes down. I think the main problem is that it looks scary at first, especially if you're not used to d3 js. And they're working on that with projects like Lyra and Vega-lite. And we're working on that with projects like the Visual Editor extension for graph editing (which isn't very general but shows that this kind of work is possible). So there are solutions to the problem but we don't have this prioritized. What we could use from the community is a big ask on things like the Community Wishlist Survey that would help us prioritize it internally. I'd be more than happy to take one or two months off of Analytics and work on this, because I think it's super important.

Turns out Vega added support for all sorts of radial and cartesian trees and dendrograms about a month ago. See examples, or some original examples (enable pictures). You can experiment with them by copy-pasting from here to the Vega editor.

Still, the question of having links in those charts remains. I think we should switch from PNGs to SVGs to allow for linking - I guess there will be a <graph mode=clickable> for these graphs - this way we will keep PNGs (smaller in size) when clicks are not needed.

+1 to allowing an SVG-rendering option.

Related tasks (not blocking since this is an additional functionality): T96309 and T78579

Removing the Possible-Tech-Projects tag as we are planning to kill it soon! This project does not seem to fit in the Outreach-Programs-Projects category in its current state, so I am not adding that tag right now!

I agree that this task is currently too vague for a newcomer to address, but I can try and help work with interested users to define some specifications, if someone is especially interested in the topic.

Likewise, happy to mentor someone if they want to work on this.