User:Bawolff/Reflections on graphs

The graphs extension has been here since about 2014. It was part of an attempt by Yurik to bring his bold vision of a more interactive Wikipedia to fruition.

I think Graph is an important attempt, and I commend everyone who worked on it for attempting to realize this vision. However, looking back, I can't help but be a little disappointed with the uptake of the Graph extension. I am beginning to feel that it might not be the right approach to bring interactivity to Wikipedia.

How is the Graphs extension used currently
Currently, on English Wikipedia, the graph extension is used on pages. This of course is a small percentage of the total pages, but nonetheless looks quite successful at first glance. However, most of these are in non-content namespaces, from a template that generates a graph of page views for a specific page (w:Template:PageViews graph).

There are 4,140 pages on en.wikipedia.org in the main namespace that use graphs. The breakdown by quality level is: +--+--+ +--+--+ +--+--+ Query: select pc, count(*) from (select  max( pa_class) 'pc', page_id from categorylinks inner join page on cl_from = page_id inner join page_assessments on pa_page_id = page_id where cl_to = 'Pages_using_the_Graph_extension' and page_namespace = 0 group by page_id ) `a` group by 1;
 * class   | count(*) |
 * FA      |       16 |
 * GA      |       64 |
 * B       |      246 |
 * C       |      593 |
 * Start   |     1624 |
 * Stub    |     1007 |
 * FL      |        5 |
 * List    |      215 |
 * Redirect |       3 |
 * Template |       1 |
 * Future  |        1 |
 * |     261 |

As a percentage, that's 0.07% overall, 0.2% of "Good Articles", 0.3% of Featured Articles. Creating good interactive content is always going to be hard. However, if the extension was successfully adopted, I would expect to see the best Wikipedia content have interactive elements where it suited the subject matter.

Furthermore, where the extension is used, it is mostly used to make simple graphs via a few specific templates: +--+--+ +--+--+ +--+--+
 * tl_title                                | count(*) |
 * Graph:Street_map_with_marks             |     2501 |
 * Graph:Chart                             |     1075 |
 * Graph:Map                               |      436 |

query: select tl_title, count(*) from templatelinks where tl_title like 'Graph:%' and tl_from_namespace = 0 and tl_namespace = 10 and tl_title not like '%/styles.css' group by 1 order by 2 desc limit 40 ;

w:Template:Graph:Street_map_with_marks is essentially only used by w:Template:OSM_Location_map, where the graph extension is used to make thumbnails for Kartographer. Well this is interactive content, I don't think this counts as really using the "graphs" extension, if its just to make a thumbnail of Kartographer content.