User:Bawolff/Interactive rich media

In 2014, Yurik wrote an essay I Dream of Content. He proposed a bold vision where users would interact with our content instead of just reading it. A museum instead of a library.

It is almost a decade later. Where are we?

The Graph and Kartographer (Maps) extensions were created out of Yurik's vision and deployed to Wikimedia. These have allowed interactive graphs and maps to be added to articles.

Kartographer does a good job of creating slidable maps with annotations. Definitely an important addition, but only minimally interactive. It certainly an improvement over a static map, but still serves mostly the same function.

The Graph extension (now temporarily disabled) was much more promising. It supported the Vega spec, which allowed a wide range of interactivity. You can see some impressive examples on their site. They even have pacman and a 2-D platformer game.

However in practice, this saw little usage. Most of the uses were special cases that were essentially static graphs. Showing graphs of page views on talk pages, etc. It was only used ~4000 main namespace pages on English Wikipedia. Almost all of those are either Kartographer related or a simple static graph that is little better than an image.

What went wrong?
What went wrong here? If interactivity is good, why did we see so little adoption? Why was most adoption of interactivity things that were just barely interactive?

Interactivity is not inherently good
Among developers, there is a misplaced optimism: Interactivity is always better than non-interactive content. This is false. Interactivity is a tool, and not globally applicable. It can help illustrate content, but it still needs to be intentionally authored. Similar to an image, an out of context image is useless.