Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:22:11 -0700 From: Brooke Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong
Note that a third-party web service is not ideal; in addition to the issues of tracking and privacy, it can't work offline and likely would require additional work to get the graphics working on mobile web, mobile apps, and offline (kiwix etc). Integrating fully with a self-contained service that is supported by our whole ecosystem and maintained in the future would be desirable in the work I'd like to make sure we do on multimedia.
-- brooke
There are basically two strategies to allow embedding of Our World in Data
graphs into wiki pages, with different strengths and weaknesses.
We started with a mirror/extract of OWID hosted on WMF cloud services, which I set up starting over a year ago. The strength of this approach is that it does not send tracking or privacy information to any third party. We had hoped WMF might adopt this mirror and make it an internal site. Translation also is easier because we control the source of the graphs. The workflow is also quite easy as each page has a button to copy the text required to embed the graph so that it can be pasted into the page editor. The weakness is that extraction from OWID must be done periodically and is vulnerable to changes in code on their end, such as their rewrite to include the Explorer versions of graphs.
We have now taken a second approach, which is to allow a user to decide if they are willing to visit a third party site via a popup asking for consent and then show the graph directly from OWID. It is phenomenal that both EU and ES Wikipedias have now implemented this strategy. The strength is that since OWID have developed their code to support embedding, the popup that shows the graph is quite manageable. The weakness is that we must rely on OWID themselves for translation of graphs and any questions of accessibility, though they are at the very least quite mobile capable as James Heilman said.
Of course the popup strategy could easily be pointed at the mirror, which would give us the ability to handle the translation. This is more a policy question than a technical one.
In terms of offline use, such as Kiwix, we planned for that with tags that tell Kiwix to use the static image instead of the interactive graph. Screen readers could also be directed to the static image as they will have difficulty managing the interactive parts of the graph.
Tim Moody