Improve Charting capabilities of Meza

[freephile]

I've started a GitHub "project" to improve Meza's charting capabilities. But "projects" only include issues, not any business case, project plan or supporting business analysis or documentation.

Here we can have a discussion that maps out the different aspects, pros & cons and priorities. Any decisions can then be reflected in the organization of issues in the project.

As background, I've compiled broad research into Graphing and Diagrams in MediaWiki.

At a minimum, it should be easy out of the box to draw pie, line, bar and column charts. There are already extensions like SMW, SRF and Mermaid in Meza that can accomplish this or even more; so perhaps one deliverable of the project would be to document that aspect of Meza.

Broad capability for data visualization.

• [FEATURE] Add Extension Visual Data #232 offers an alternative to SMW and Cargo, managing data by leveraging JSON schema
• plan to implement as a local extension if not added to core

Remove deprecated extension

• [BUG] Remove Graph extension #251 Need to remove the Graph extension (archived page) since it is not suitable for a public wiki and the source is not currently maintained. We did fork the repo however we do not have any intention to take over maintenance without a plan for sponsorship.

Add new extensions

• The Chart extension - WMF replacement for Graph and based on Apache ECharts looks possible, but complex in how it relies heavily on JsonConfig
• The Layers extension looks quite useful (but sadly does not support SVG). Despite its utility, it is not a general solution for pie charts etc. Instead it seems perfectly suited for use cases where you want to draw various aspects of a diagram in layers or overlays.

Develop new extensions or on-wiki capabilities (e.g. Gadgets or Templates)

• We created a proof of concept implementation of Charts.css as an extension in MediaWiki.
• Maybe try Charts.js?
• Possibly resurrect the old R extension. For the repo, see https://github.com/sigbertklinke/R
• Wikipedia uses this template https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Pie_chart but copying it is difficult due to the spaghetti of code.