An Open Toolkit for Small-Scale Data Visualizations

Abstract

Wikipedia represents an open and collaborative encyclopedic environment, and is one of the main sources of information today. The information is encoded, among other formats, in graphics and data visualizations. The source of such pieces of information is various — some are taken from governmental sources, or reports published under Creative Commons licenses, others are created and uploaded by the platform users. Given the current UI of the Wikipedia platform, however, most of these contents are relegated to small thumbnails, making them difficult to read. In the research presented here we propose an open toolkit for the design of data visualizations in small spaces — such as thumbnails — conceived for the project’s contributors. By engaging with the design of visualizations for the platform and contributing to the project, it was possible to identify good practices that were then synthesized in a toolkit openly accessible to all contributors.