Proposal:Markup for charts and graphs

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.

1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation.
4. Ensure that the underlying project infrastructure is secure, stable, and sufficient to guarantee the permanence of the projects and support ongoing growth.
5. Encourage Innovation.

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Summary

By now Wikipedia has markup/code for everything—math (TeX), parser functions, location maps, and even SVG is supported. However, what is notably missing from many articles (other than high-quality portraits) are graphs and charts. Today, in order to put a chart on Wikipedia, one has to create it in OpenOffice, MS Excel, or another program, save it as an image, and upload. This is a tedious task and not fit for making charts en-masse. Furthermore, it makes charts difficult to modify or update, especially for multiple users. Chart mark-up would also standardize chart appearences across the project.

Proposal

Create markup, possibly using PHP's image extensions (or something similar) to allow users to create charts using WikiMarkup or another form of simple to understand code.

Motivation

Wikipedia is missing not just specific content, but specific types of content—high-quality portraits, high-quality educational videos and sounds, and charts. Charts and an easy and engaging way to present statistical information, and will attract more readers to information that would otherwise be overlooked. Compared to the value, this feature should be simpler to implement than the proposals for more sounds, for example, and could be done by one developer.

Key Questions

• What can we do to make our information more compelling?
• Should Wikipedia be encouraging not just more media, but more types of media?

Potential Costs

• Mostly developer time

Implementations

• http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/ uses TeX which we already use for equations
• http://www.gnuplot.info/ there are already mw:Category:Gnuplot extensions
• mw:Extension:Plotters using JavaScript only
• mw:Extension:WikiPlot implented completely in PHP

References

• Proposal:Markup for Maps

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Markup for charts and graphs.

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