Dear all, Two months ago, I wrote this message when we had been without graphs for two years. Some of the answers said that the roll out was imminent, and eventually that happened last week for all wikis. This was a long-waited issue, as we have been around 10% of the history of Wikipedia with an error message instead of a graph. To my surprise, the new charts extension doesn't solve the issue, except for a very small subsets of graphs.
Three years ago, we partnered with the University of the Basque Country to show climate data in articles. Some students worked on fetching and uploading the data to Commons, and we had a cool interactive graph for showing the data. Just two weeks after completion the graphs were disabled, so they were unable to show the result anywhere. This week, after charts come again, we discovered that those interactive graphs can't be shown, as the only solution gives is an unusable line chart (https://eu.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Altsasu&diff=10310336&oldid=10118272). Another main use case was showing population growth graphs using Wikidata. Having population data in Wikidata isn't a surprise at all. After all, Wikidata is for data. However, the charts can't show data coming from our data site. Instead, the suggestion is to reupload all the data from Wikidata to Commons, making it not only redundant, but difficult to track. And even if that was solved, the approach would be to create a graph definition for every populated place in the world, instead of just having one graph loading data from Wikidata. What should we do? Should we delete the broken graphs and assume that we won't have a solution for those? Or should we wait two more years to have something usable? The situation is critical, but not serious. Galder ________________________________ From: Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 21, 2025 7:35 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List <[email protected]> Subject: Two years without graphs Dear all, Two years ago, all graphs were disabled because there was a security issue. Two years later, we still have a message telling readers that graphs are broken and that it will be fixed soon. Two years gone, two years of negligence, two years of abandonment, two years of obsolescence. The team that should be fixing it announced that the graphs would be live again this month (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T369944). There's not even a plan for that to happen (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T383079). Two years lost, two years without a solution. Last year, a group of volunteers partially solved the issue with the OWID gadget. The WMF asked to stop solving things, while they had a meeting with people from OurWorldInData to talk about security. Seven months after the last update from the WMF, we are still waiting for a formal agreement that, obviously, is not going to happen. (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:OWID_Gadget) Half a year ago I participated in a discussion about this issue and I said that the strategy was clear: make everyone forget that we even had graphs, so there's no need to solve the issue. No one has proven me wrong. Two years without graphs. Two years further from our goal to be the central infrastructure of free knowledge. Galder.
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/O2HSXDRVZEDALZTCZMJCRI67WGPRHHK5/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
