Beyond Initial Creation: Two Decades of Community-based Chart Revisions from Wikimedia Commons

Shows a series of before / after images of charts that have been edited on wikimedia commons. (a) a pie chart, (b) transition from pie to bar chart, (c) a line chart, (d) bar chart, (3) combination bar and line chart.
Examples of Wikimedia Commons chart revisions where one contributor made changes to others’ work. (a) Changed the mark color scheme and added data labels. (b) Changed a donut chart to a stacked bar chart and added new data. (c) Changed the framing of a text annotation referencing a politically sensitive event. (d) Removed the 3D effects and the legend in a bar chart and increased the x-axis range. (e) A single contributor updated a chart with new data annually.
Abstract
Open online communities like Wikipedia offer a rich space for understanding the organic evolution of public-facing artifacts, but little is known about how these communities collectively edit chart images. We investigate the phenomenon of "community editing" of visualizations by exploring chart revision patterns on Wikimedia Commons. We introduce a novel dataset of 7,786 longitudinal chart revisions across 1,664 images, labeled with edit categories using an LLM pipeline. Initial data analysis uncovered several novel findings. Multi-contributor revision is associated with more edits to mark styling and text content compared to single-contributor revision. Temporally, mark and text edits occur in more "bursty" cadences than data edits. In addition, while SVG charts attract more unique contributors and revisions than raster charts, their edit histories involve more tightly scoped and less diverse changes. This dataset enables a wide range of analyses of chart change over time.
Materials
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Authors
Jasmine Y. Shih
Chase Stokes
Marti Hearst
Citation
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Beyond Initial Creation: Two Decades of Community-based Chart Revisions from Wikimedia Commons

Jasmine Y. Shih, Chase Stokes, Melanie Tory, and Marti Hearst. Proc. IEEE Visualization Conference—VIS. 2026.

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