Sharing visually engaging infographics is a good strategy to inform the audience in a fun, pleasing way. That’s why we created Wiki Infographics, now officially launched on Toolforge at https://infographics.toolforge.org.
This tool was in Wikimedia Brasil’s Plan of Activities 2024 main deliverables. The aim was to leverage structured information within Wikimedia projects to create informative and visually engaging infographics in both fixed and dynamic formats, under an open license.
Wiki Infographics development started in May 2024 as an Outreachy project from Wikimedia Brasil. The intern James Okolie, together with mentors Éder Porto and Lucas Belo, developed the first version of the tool throughout Outreachy Round 28. Initially, the team wrote the Technical Plan for the tool, delineating technical stack, design, possible risks, deployment plan, among other necessary planning. The tool needed to be responsive, accessible, and low-bandwidth, which are design principles of Wikimedia Brasil.
The technical stack consisted of a Flask (Python) back end with a React (JavaScript) front end, interacting with the Wikidata Query Service API. The tool worked by getting the data from a Wikidata query and transforming it into a table visualization and a bar chart race visualization. Bar chart races are a kind of animation that was popular back in 2024 and still is an engaging way of sharing information.
A first initial version was deployed at the end of 2024 on Toolforge. However, the React front end deployment on Toolforge was not working correctly. There was no documentation on how to deploy a tool with this stack, such as the “my first Django tool” tutorials on Wikitech.
In 2025, Artur Corrêa started refactoring the tool to make it more easily deployable. The first step was switching from Flask to Django. Wikimedia Brasil has a lot of other tools written in Django, such as QuickStatements 3.0 that Artur worked on. Besides that, React integration with Django had better documentation available. Then, back end and front end were unified on the same repository, making testing and deploying easier. Bugs that emerged from initial testing were solved and new features were implemented. The new features include: light/dark mode switch, translations integrated with TranslateWiki and being able to download the bar chart race graph as a video.
On October 21st, 2025, Éder and Artur officially launched the tool in Wikidata Lab XLVII.
To use the tool, you just need a Wikidata Query Service SPARQL query. Wiki Infographics accepts all kinds of queries. Currently, the tool has two visualizations: table and bar chart race. The table one accepts all queries. The bar chart race requires a specific format to be used. If a query has the format the visualization needs, it is available to use.
The bar chart race is a popular format and a very engaging one. On it, you can see numeric values progress over time in a battle between the bars. For example, use this link to check the evolution of the Brazilian state capitals population. Or use this link to check the evolution of country count per world continent.Try it out. Use the tool to produce cool visualizations, download them as a video and share anywhere. Check our Meta-Wiki page at https://w.wiki/FkeA. Read the documentation, see examples and give feedback on the talk page. Cheers!
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