User talk:Bawolff/Reflections on graphs

I would be curious if you agree/disagree/had thoughts - you know much more about this subject than I do. And thanks for the Graphs extension. Without it, I would have nothing to reflect on. Also ping since you seem to be interested in this subject recently. Bawolff (talk) 15:51, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I just want to be able to have interactive graphs like this.
 * The reason this tool is not used that extensively used yet is it is simple not functional enough. Check out here for a bunch of times it simple does not work.
 * Those 50% not working ones means we cannot go live their. Doc James (talk) 16:58, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The cases that don't work on that page seem to be because the template is expecting an (ISO 3166) country code, but the .tab file at commons is listing out the country name or sometimes non-country entities. Bawolff (talk) 18:02, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

"I think the fundamental problem with the Graph extension is its both too high level and too low level at the same time."

Hit the nail on the head. It took me days to figure out how to work with Vega, and once I learned it, I realized just how much stuff the extension cannot do. It's not reasonable to expect many editors to specialize in this kind of content creation given the learning curve, and even when they do, it becomes a curse of knowing just how much cool stuff you can't do.

"We need to better understand the types of things that Wikipedians want in their articles, so that we can make tools to give that to them."

Also a great observation. While developing w:Template:Interactive COVID-19 maps, editors gave me great feedback and lots of cool ideas (they still are!), a lot of which just weren't possible with Vega 2. Similar to how we had the meta consultation on talk pages a few months ago, it may be worth having a consultation on interactive content. En Wikipedia is great, but it would be nice to know what other parts of the movement want. What would interactive content on wiktionary look like? How could Wikibooks use this tool? Wugapodes (talk) 00:45, 2 April 2020 (UTC)