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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia certainly does have animations and videos. Here's a list of literally every article with a video, there are over 5,000 of them at least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_containing_v...

For comparison, Encarta had "over 300 videos".

And while it's not interactive, there are definitely animations on Wikipedia to help understand concepts, like the top of the article on pi shows a circle unrolling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

As for truly interactive explanations... I'm not sure there's really any kind of technological standard for that right now that people could collaboratively edit. At least not in the way JPEG and SVG are available to everyone. Do you have any suggestions?

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There actually are two methods of interactivity on Wikipedia right now, the Graph extension [0] and Kartographer. [1] With the first you can create charts, timelines, and histograms, based on Vega. With the second, you can add points on maps (with images), have shapes, and outlines, from OpenStreetMap. Unfortunately, both aren't used as much as they should because most are comfortable using other tools and baking things into PNGs, and these weren't advertised that heavily.

[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Kartographer

That's really interesting! I had no idea, I've never actually come across an interactive graph in the wild on Wikipedia.

But when I think "interactivity", I think of things especially in articles about physics, math, or sciences generally -- pulling on a spring to show oscillation, showing how the angles of a triangle add up to 180°, a real-time dynamic water cycle, etc.

I'm assuming Vega can't do stuff like that? Is there any tool that can?

I personally dont think vega has worked out that well. Its too low level to be used by wikipedians effectively but its too high level to make effective abstractions over. I think its a good first attempt but we really need a v2 interactivity plan.

Also if you havent read, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik/I_Dream_of_Conten... is an interesting essay by the guy who used to be working on the graph stuff at wikipedia.

I also forgot to mention interactive 3D models in STL format. [0]

There's also a user who has done amazing work [1] with SVG files, but these mainly only work if you view the original file, as MediaWiki generates a static PNG thumbnail for SVG files (silly, but maybe was needed at some point for proper support).

[0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:3D

[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee/svg

Oh wow! An even better page of theirs is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee/Dynamic_SVG_for_Wi...

This is a great example of just basic animation:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Circulat...

My crazy idea on the subject is to use existing lua support in wikipedia, transpile to js, and give it a <canvas>.

Another idea that is thrown around sometimes is using scripted svgs in an iframe sandbox

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